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Comment by devmunchies | Hacker News Reader

Linux scrub Q, does NVIDIA not use any Linux for themselves? Or is it a financial reason to ignore Linux?

NVidia makes the best Linux driver + graphics card combination going, and always have. If you actually want to play games on Linux, NVidia cards are the way to go. But open-source people don't like them because their driver isn't open-source, and Wayland people don't like them because their driver has limited Wayland support.

Absolutely the opposite experience here. I used Nvidia ~2015-2020, and AMD since. AMD works much better, period. This is with Arch Linux and NixOS.

At least NVidia did not replace their driver with a less capable one for older cards.

So instead of GL 4.1, AMD opens source does GL 3.3 for older APUs, and good luck trying to get any kind of video decoding acceleration.

the creator and maintainer of linux .. Linus Trovalds .. would disagree with you a bit [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2lhwb_OckQ

Torvalds tries to have his cake and eat it with the ridiculous Linux approach to drivers; there's no stable API, and he wants you to contribute your drivers to the kernel tree, but also even leaving aside copyright issues he won't accept drivers into the kernel tree if he's not happy with them.

I think they don't care about the userspace at all. I assume from their perspective, most (all?) of the Linux use-case is for their expensive cards to be running in servers doing CUDA.

Yet CUDA still basically only runs on RHEL and Ubuntu LTS.

(tbf to Nvidia tho, their support is improving and with big tech putting a lot of weight behind cloud compute the problem will likely resolve itself)

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