Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex43578 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not the OEMs job to ensure compatibility with every OS. They shouldn’t have to ensure it works well with Windows XP, for example.

View on HN

Windows XP went EOL on April 8, 2014. "Linux", assuming you mean the latest Linux kernel, is not.

Do they also need to support MacOS, Chrome OS, and FreeBSD? They made these laptops to work with Windows. It’s not on them to ensure compatibility with anything more than they were marketed for.

> Do they also need to support MacOS, Chrome OS, and FreeBSD?

They basically do. ChromeOS runs a Linux kernel, so the userland has everything it needs to run CUDA. FreeBSD is a first-class target for Nvidia drivers, and macOS used to be supported too but stopped signing Nvidia code. Nevertheless, AArch64 is still supported for CUDA et. al..

It is up to Nvidia to support whatever platforms they want users to be on. In their case, it means supporting many OSes.

The article says "A real fix depends on Nvidia, specifically on porting the platform controller’s power management logic into its Linux driver, which would effectively turn the laptop into a portable version of the DGX Spark."

My point is that's not Nvidia's responsibility. The article itself admits the laptop "ships with Windows on ARM", so support for another OS shouldn't be expected, even if NVIDIA supports other platforms and other product lines differently.

These aren't "other product lines" though. They are RTX and Spark SOC products that do support Linux as a first-class citizen with all of their hardware. The RTX Spark is the outlier, and the breakage is not on the GPU product, but the SOC devicetree drivers. This is only a problem because Nvidia avoided standard Windows power management a-la ACPI/UEFI, and has to port the remainder to Linux by hand. Non-laptop products like the DGX Spark support this via UEFI natively.

There are OEMs that refuse this responsibility. If that's the vindication you wanted, there you go. This specific issue is not a catastrophic oversight though.

Last time i check, Both HaikuOS and React OS is still being actively developed

They should at least be releasing sufficient hardware specs so that people can use the hardware they've purchased how they like.

They can do whatever they want, of course. But why wouldn't they support Linux? It's a weak argument to compare Ubuntu and Fedora, modern freely available operating systems in wide use by the tech community, to Windows XP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com