Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

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> Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]:

Is this an Ad Hominem ? Linus does not mention there a single thing that they are actually doing wrong.

> Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]:

Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME. Drew just does not want to support the nvidia-wy in wl-roots, which is a super super niche WM toolkit whose "major" user is sway, another super super niche WM.

Drew is angry for two reasons. First, sway users complain to them that sway does not work with nvidia hardware, which as a user of a WM is a rightful thing to complain about. Second, Drew does not want to support the nvidia-way, and it is angry and nvidia because they do not support the way that wl-roots has chosen.

It is 100% ok for Drew to say that they don't want to maintain 2 code-paths, and wl-roots and sway do not support nvidia. It is also 100% ok for nvidia to consider wl-roots to niche to be worth the effort.

What's IMO not ok is for Drew to feel entitled about getting nvidia to support wl-roots. Nvidia does not owe wl-roots anything.

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IMO when it comes to drivers and open-source, a lot of the anger and conflict seems to steem from a sentiment of entitlement.

I read online comments _every day_ of people that have bought some hardware that's advertised as "does not support Linux" (or Macos, or whatever) being angry at the hardware manufacturer (why doesn't your hardware support the platform that says it does not support? I'm entitled to support!!!), the dozens of volunteers that reverse engineer and develop open source drivers for free (why doesn't the open source driver that you develop in your free time work correctly? I'm entitled to you working for free for me so that I can watch netflix!), etc. etc. etc.

The truth of the matter is, that for people using nvidia hardware on linux for Machine Learning, CAD, rendering, visualization, games, etc. their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support.

The only complaints I hear is people buying nvidia to do something that they know is not supported and then lashing out at everybody else due to entitlement.

What exactly are you invested in in this discussion? We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices. But you seem to just want to take on people's personal views on Nvidia now.

You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices. I would agree with that in the sense that Nvidia can do whatever they want: nobody is obliged to buy Nvidia, and Nvidia is not obliged to cater to everyone's needs. It's a free enough market. But even if you don't agree with some/most of the complaints surely you must agree that Nvidia's track record of pissing of both other companies (and people) is problematic for when they take control of a company with an ecosystem driven business model like ARM's?

> I would agree with that in the sense that Nvidia can do whatever they want: nobody is obliged to buy Nvidia, and Nvidia is not obliged to cater to everyone's needs. It's a free enough market.

I'd agree with you this is OP's argument, however it's main flaw is in explicitly omitting the fact that NVidia is not the only party that's "free" to do things.

We're not obliged to buy their cards and we aren't obliged to stay silent regarding its treatment of the open-source community and why we think it would be bad for them to acquire ARM.

I am always amazed at the amount of pro-corporate spin from (presumably) regular people who are little more than occasional customers.

> We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices.

We still are. I asked about "which specific business practices are these", and was only pointed out to ad hominems, entitlement, and one sided arguments.

Feel free to continue discussing that on the different parent thread. I'm interested on multiple views on this.

> You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices

No. I couldn't care less about nvidia, but when somebody acts like an entitled choosing beggar, I point that out. And there is a lot of entitlement in the arguments that people are making about why nvidia is bad at working with others.

Nvidia has some of the best drivers for Linux there are. This driver is not open source and distributed as a binary blob. Nvidia is very clear that this is the only driver that they support on Linux, and if you are not fine with that, they are fine with you not buying their products. This driver supports all of their products very well (as opposed to AMD's, for example), its development is made by people being paid full time to do it (as opposed to most of their competitors which also have people helping on their drivers on their free time - this is not necessarily bad, but it is what it is), and some of their developments are contributed back to open source, for free.

People are angry about this. Why? The only thing that comes to mind is entitlement. Somebody wants to use an nvidia card on Linux without using their proprietary driver. They know this is not supported. Yet they buy the card anyways, and then they complain. They do not only complain about nvidia. They also complain about, e.g., nouveau being bad, the Linux kernel being bad, and many other things. As if nvidia, or as if the people working on nouveau or the Linux kernel for free on their free time owes them anything.

I respect people not wanting to use closed source software. Don't use windows, don't use macosx, use alternatives. Want to use linux? don't use nvidia if you don't want to.

No, thank you. Can we do without the Reddit attitude here please? The choosing beggars, the needless quoting of debate fallacies in what is not a debate?

If you ask your impression of Nvidia's business practices, and they give you their opinion, you can't somehow invalidate that opinion by retorting with debate fallacies. That's the "fallacy fallacy" if you're sensitive to that. This is not a debate competition about who's right, this is people giving their opinions based on Nvidia's past and current actions. You asked a question, and they answered. This is not a competition. Please give them the basic respect of acknowledging their opinion.

This is so wrong.

We are discussing a topic, and people throwed multiple arguments that do not make sense.

You are claiming that I should just shut up and respect their feelings, but that is worthless.

Two examples:

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Somebody's argument was: "Linus doesn't like them, therefore I don't like them".

The reason these are called logical fallacies is because these arguments are illogical. I told them that this was a logical fallacy (argument of authority - just because someone with authority makes an argument does not mean they are right), and ask them _why_, what is it that linus and you do not like.

I am happy I did that, because many of them have raised multiple actually-valuable arguments in response. For example, because nvidia's hardware throttles down if the driver firmware is not signed, and this makes the open source drivers slower for no reason.

That's a valid and valuable argument. Linus doesn't like them is worthless.

The person who raised this argument learned something from somebody else which knew what Linus did not like, and so did I.

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The same happened when I called out the entitled choosing beggars. "Why are you angry at nvidia for not providing an open source driver ? You knew before buying their product that only the binary driver was supported."

Read the responses. The reason they are angry, is because they don't have a choice but to use nvidia, because the competition products (AMD in those cases) are much worse. AMD does have open source drivers, but they are crap, and they don't support many of AMD's products, at least for compute, which is something that many (including myself) use for work.

These people have picked a platform that values open source code, but due to their job requiring them to actually get some work done, they must use nvidia for that, and they don't like having to compromise on a proprietary driver.

Honestly, I think this is still entitlement, but I definitely sympathize with the frustration of having to make compromises one does not like.

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From the point of view of whether nvidia buying ARM is good or bad. I still have no idea. ARM does _a lot_ of open source work, its major market are Android and Linux communities.

I understand that people are afraid that Nvidia will turn ARM into a bad open source player. It can happen. But without Android, iOS, and Linux, ARM is worthless. So a different outcome of this could be that NVIDIA buying ARM ends up making NVIDIA more open source friendly, since at least the Linux market is important for nvidia as well (~50% of their revenue).

It definitely makes sense for regulatory authorities to only allow somebody to buy ARM that will preserve ARM deals with current vendors (apple, google, samsung, etc.), and that also will preserve ARM open platform efforts.

If nvidia does not agree to that, they should not be allowed to buy arm.

> their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support.

Except that they stop supporting older HW at some point. That, together with occasional crashes learned me not to buy nVidia HW again.

> Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME.

NVIDIA insisted on pushing its own EGL streams even as the wider community was moving in a different direction.

They suffer from a major NIH syndrome and do not know how to work with others at all.

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