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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

NVIDIA’s main target on Linux is data center cards (Teslas). Desktop is just happen to be supported for the hobbyist market.

This was not like that before their Tesla series took off with such momentum.Currently, X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people.

I think some parts of their drivers do some black magic, because if that was not the case, there should not be a tug of war about the technical details for providing Wayland support.

Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly, but not the CUDA parts, because it’s the money making part.

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Not sure where you're getting that from. NVIDIA has supported professional desktop Linux usage since before anyone was doing AI on their GPUs. All of their GPUs worked well.

I've been running NVIDIA GPUs on Linux workstations in personal and professional settings for almost 20 years. It's been always been an extremely functional and high performance experience.

It's annoying that the drivers are proprietary, and have to be rebuilt during kernel upgrades, but they have worked very well for a long time.

Same. I have been running on and off Nvidia on Linux for more than 20 years and they have committed to the platform for all this time.

It would of course be better if the drivers where OSS and integrated in the kernel, but for more than a decade Nvidia was the only option for high performance graphics on Linux (Intel always had very good stable OSS drivers but not the hardware to match).

The problem is, not everyone can get the latest and greatest card a couple of years for their desktop system for their workstations.

For AI work, their cards are great, yes. Also for accelerated science. We have quite a few of their cards at the bottom floor, churning out number non-stop.

However, desktop experience with their cards are constantly degrading after Tesla got up to speed. VSync can't be enabled without losing 25% performance hit. DPMS support was broken for 1.5 years on DisplayPort. Then, DisplayPort started to lose link when you turn off your monitor for whatever reason.

These things add-up, and when your card is deprecated you can't move to open drivers even if said drivers have lower performance, it breaks the camel's back.

If you're on the happy path (hardware + software wise), NVIDIA is great, and if you don't, you're too poor for NVIDIA and they can't be bothered.

So no, I'll not be buying NVIDIA card for my desktop use.

> NVIDIA’s main target on Linux is data center cards

Linux has been supported before their were data center cards. Before GPU compute was a thing there was workstations which are in fact still a thing.

> Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly,

In 20 years of usage this appears to be inaccurate. I'm not even 100% sure what your GPU has to do with monitor power management fails which historically consist wholly and only of distros/desktops setting the sleep threshold way to short and whatever half assed hack is being used to keep their machine from turning the monitor off in the middle of their youtube video fails to work properly. The solution as with a lot of over-complicated things is simplicity. Set the threshold far higher and if you actually want the monitor to shut off do so. In any case it again has little to do with your GPU

> X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people.

Not sure where this is coming from at all. X11 support has pretty much always been great. The most reasonable thing to suppose is that the Linux desktop ecosystem has been historically somewhat fragile especially if you insist on the latest and greatest and that Nvidia due to open source unfriendliness seems to catch a greater than average share of the blame.

Someone will post a random thread on a entirely unrelated matter without even mentioning nvidia and somewhere down thread someone will be blaming Nvidia.

> Well recently my cat got the mange...

>> Are you running NVIDIA? It's known to cause that.

>>> Oh ya I installed NVIDIA recently and my cat is 100% dead!

>>>> My neighbor installed NVIDIA and my cat is now a dog

Look at this singular thread where NVIDIA is assigned the blame for flaky wifi, bluetooth, and display power management.

Official Nvidia drivers for macOS back when those still existed were second class citizens too. They had a rotating cast of odd bugs you’d never see with the Windows drivers.

Non-Windows desktop users definitely don’t seem to be among Nvidia’s chief concerns.

A factor in this case may be the fact that while desktops remain a very sizeable segment in the PC space in the Mac space an actual traditional desktop is available only as a very high priced workstation which starts at $7000 whereas more traditional users are apt to be served by minis or imacs.

There were probably about 1000x more Linux desktop users than Mac Pro users willing to install their own aftermarket GPU even when this was a thing.

There is another group of macOS users who were buying Nvidia cards: hackintoshers (those who hack macOS to run on generic PCs). For several years, by far the most cost effective, powerful, and flexible “mac” available was one that you built yourself from a selection of known-compatible components. Many in this group were buying Nvidia GPUs for use in these machines since Nvidia was furnishing macOS drivers at that point.

It’s hard to tell how numerous this group was, but I saw them come up surprisingly often in photos and discussions online, even appearing in production environments (despite legal dodginess). Wouldn’t be surprised if at times this is where most Nvidia cards purchased for use with macOS were sold.

To be, frankly, more fair than they deserve, with CUDA they don't have to worry about anyone else. It's their API, they just have to maintain it themselves. When supporting X or Wayland they have to play nice and integrate with other people and their APIs.

> Desktop is just happen to be supported for the hobbyist market.

That Linux hobbyist market is barely relevant. Desktop Linux is supported by Nvidia because it is a big thing in the SFX industry.

They put a ton of effort into supporting the Linux desktop market, all considering.

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