> How about “fuck you NVIDIA”?

That got the appropriate response.

Hint: it wasn't replacing Linux, as that would be an impossibly huge task.

Instead NVIDIA rewrote their drivers, so secret source code no one was supposed to see run on their secret source hardware. The system that replaced was asking every customer work around the licences incompatibilities by compiling it themselves.

The smarter "f u nvidia" move would be for big tech companies to go to TSMC directly for their GPUs and cut out nvidia. They'd have to design the chips of course but that's probably easier than designing and writing an OS.

Nvidia doesn't need an OS. They sell hardware, and their hardware receives driver support on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and previously, MacOS. If you built and documented an OS for AI-based tasks, Nvidia would probably be the first OEM to merge hardware support.

Linus' comment towards Nvidia was not made from the perspective of a business, either. He was lamenting that their drivers are nonfree and that their desktop support was lazy. Neither of those things matter to 99% of businesses that are using Nvidia hardware for AI compute. Also, both aren't strictly true anymore in 2025 as Nvidia officially supports Wayland now and technically has "Open" drivers.