Hacker News Reader

Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

Yes, they only can do only one good thing - go bankrupt. That would be the best news for open-source.

Should open-source perhaps drop NVidia, instead of the other way around?

This divestiture happened long ago, if your running Linux not on a server, then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box.

Even there though, only Intel has a buttery smooth experience. Ryzen for laptops is half baked (terrible USB C docking performance, occasional crashing on Windows and Linux with the 2xxxU series CPU/GPU chips) and AMD GPUs still require manual intervention to load proprietary firmware.

AMD does make some performant mobile GPUs though, they work well in Debian!

Funny, I stick with NVidia because they still offer more reliable, performant drivers for Linux (or these days FreeBSD), open source or no.

How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers?

I switched to Wayland a few years back as vsync is quite nice to have, but whenever I go back to Xorg for AnyDesk or TeamViewer on AMD or Intel there is a fair bit of tearing.

Nvidia could have a competitive open source driver tomorrow if they released redistributable firmware that allowed reclocking the GPU.

> How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers?

As a FreeBSD user I'm still "trapped" on Xorg anyway, and in any case I'd rather stick with what works than learn some whole new way of doing things for marginal benefits.

This is the sort of mentality I left the *BSD world for. Xorg is not some elegant codebase that's being unfairly targeted by an upstart.

> Xorg is not some elegant codebase that's being unfairly targeted by an upstart.

I never said it was. I said it's a whole new way of doing things for marginal benefits; is that not accurate?

You're not. I've been using Wayland exclusively on FreeBSD for a couple years now, with both AMD and Intel GPUs.

How do you go back to Xorg? Logout/login and/or reboot or is there a better way? I'm asking this because I often need screen sharing to work with my customers (demoes, check problems, etc) and I'm sticking with Xorg because Wayland doesn't do screen sharing.

Or even if they simply stopped signing their firmware. Nouveau has been perfectly capable of writing their own firmware.

Intel's drivers are far more reliable in my experience.

Slightly more reliable, but they don't make any cards that are good enough for gaming with IME.

They might work, for some definition of working, now getting the full capabilities of the GPU is another matter.

OpenGL 3.3 when the proprietary drivers do OpenGL 4.1 for example.

https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html

> then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box.

I have an Intel GFX card. Had an AMD 5700. Linux support sucked, switched back to intel.

So AFAICT, only intel and nvidia have good Linux driver support, and only intel has good open source linux driver support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com