Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

A system should only be a mystery in so far that you were too lazy to look up how exactly something works. Having "undocumented service" running wild should be unacceptable, even so it has become so common place. Linux isn't free of this, far too many times there is no man-page to tell you what something does, but at least you can dig into the source if you have to.

View on HN

Not with 3rd party drivers. I think people fetishize the desire to have complete control, and it is a myth. I've been using Linux since 1997, and all the fighting for transparency has been a tempest in a teapot with no progress made at ALL.

If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.

This isn't so much whataboutism as it is about trying to coerce an ecosystem of hundreds of vendors to listen to a small cadre of open source proponents.

If the Linux kernel forces AMD to improve UAI and make it look like LAM, I'd consider that a victory. Let's see what happens.

Nobody forces you to buy NVIDIA hardware. I don't.

Correct, and not even on ideological grounds for me. Intel's stuff was good enough at the time and a lot cheaper.

Aye, the open AMD graphics drivers are pretty good.

Nouveau will get there, one hopes...

The need isn’t to have complete control in actuality, but instead the ability to control any particular something in the system, or at least understand it.

i.e. the ability to examine and understand something weird that’s going on and that may be a potential problem.

You've brought up the Nvidia blobs twice now. You are right that those drivers are distributed without source, and so remain a mystery. The key difference is that the Nvidia drivers are the exception. There are open source drivers available for most GPUs, including Nvidia. Personally, I have never felt the need to use anything other than open source drivers. In short, I'm living the dream: every software component in my computer is inspectable. There are no ineffable mysteries.

This ideal falls short in the hardware realm, where we have to contend with the Intel Management Engine and the like.

Nevertheless, the modern Linux world is vastly more open and accessible than the closed-by-design Apple world. Even if I had to use Nvidia drivers, that would be one binary blob in a sea of open source, whereas the Apple ecosystem is opaque binary blobs as far as the eye can see, without even the courtesy of documentation. It makes a difference.

The open source driver doesn’t work correctly. I use Clear Linux which follows a stateless design, similar to NixOS or Guix. However I had to install the proprietary driver as the color profile for my monitor was setup incorrectly, and the DE (Gnome) would crash/freeze.

It is not a myth. I know every service running on my personal machines (the Ubuntu workstations at work do get away from me a bit...)

Here's the practical upshot - once, many moons ago, I forwarded port 22 to my home desktop machine so I could access it remotely. I had fail2ban running and regularly checked the logs, so I wasn't worried. What I didn't realize was that maybe 6 months prior I'd made a test account for some purpose, with 'test' as the username and password. Inevitably, some worm managed to guess this combo in less than the 6 tries before fail2ban kicked in. The kicker, though? I was sitting at the machine when it happened, and I could tell immediately. The HDD light was flashing, and I knew it shouldn't be. There was load on the CPU, and I knew there shouldn't be. Checked 'top', spotted the weird process immediately, killed it, locked the account (it never escaped the test account so no harm done) and went on with my day.

Can you imagine that story on Windows? "My hard drive light is blinking and I don't know why" - yep, that's daily life. "There's a weird process in the list" - yep, there's lots of those, good luck tracking down which company is responsible.

> If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.

Why would I ever buy Nvidia? Asking as a non-AI developer who doesn’t play PC-games.

I’m perfectly happy with Intel graphics. I hear it has good, open-source drivers too.

Exactly what am I missing?

> If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.

I don't use Nvidia because of this, and I'm not alone. If you ask "what is the best graphics card for linux" on a linux forum you will invariably get a chorus of "not Nvidia".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com