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I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this; they've got a very tiny and very vocal market share that behaves very very differently from their main customer ba

I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this; they've got a very tiny and very vocal market share that behaves very very differently from their main customer base. With Windows users NVIDIA know that they want pretty games and they want them prettier very year, and they also know that Microsoft is probably going to work with them to make that happen. They've also got game developers and hardware vendors lining up to get NVIDIA logos on their products. Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. On top of all that, this menagerie only accounts for about 3.8% of the desktop market. And they're also kicking and screaming that NVIDIA isn't doing enough to support the things that they want to do. Sure NVIDIA could be working faster to better support Linux by throwing more people and money at it, but they don't have to and until more people use Linux they don't really have much of an incentive to do so. They'll probably have better Linux support, eventually, and if that fits in with their business plan then that's fine. If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else.

shmerl 9y ago
> If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else. That's exactly what's happening. But the other side of the coin is, that in order to switch, the other choice should be good enough. Until recently, AMD had too many downsides, that many were ready to suffer through Nvidia's problems. But that is changing now. You can observe the trend here (it's not a big sample yet, but it's still showing the trend): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends Note: you need to click "trends" there to display change over time.
rodgerd 9y ago
> I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this Nvidia are toxic arseholes whose business practises are on a par with 90s Microsoft - funding games studios to deliver crippled-on-AMD games, for example. They deserve bankruptcy, not sympathy.
danieldk 9y ago
Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. There is one big elephant in the room here that you are missing and that is GPU computing. This is probably a big market for them now (Teslas go for a couple of thousand a pop) and the vast majority of it is on Linux. Their ecosystem with CUDA and CuDNN is pretty awesome, on the other hand, their driver has issues. At any rate, it's a market that they cannot afford to lose. As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing they may not have a lock on the market as they have now.
- ktta 9y ago
  >As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing I wonder if the complex OpenCL API throws off many ML developers. Also I think they tend to focus on CUDA because there is much less chance of it breaking between devices. OTOH, each vendor has their own .so for OpenCL and they usually tend to be buggy and stay a point version or two behind. This is the explanation I tell myself when I wonder why the hell Google chose CUDA over OpenCL.
  - thawkins 9y ago
    Also, on machines with mixed intel/nvidia setuos, why cant i use the intel solely for display and the nvidia soley for compute,why does the gpu have to be tied into the display system, its a pain in tbe ass. To use cuda you almost must make tbe gpu work as a display system.
    - ktta 9y ago
      You should be able to do that. You can use the Nvidia GPU in a 'headless' mode.
      - 9y ago
sjellis 9y ago
You are mistaking the variety of desktops with a variety of graphics stacks (which there aren't). At the levels of the stack that nVidia work at, there are only a small number of options (sometimes one), maintained by specialist developers who work closely together, and more or less share one long-term roadmap. For example, if you do OpenGL on Linux, you use the Mesa library, and so does everybody else. If you care about protocols, X11 is the legacy standard that everybody used to work with, and Wayland is the agreed replacement. We swear at nVidia because Intel developers have been good members of the community for years, and AMD have made an effort to become constructive participants. nVidia still aren't.
- badsectoracula 9y ago
  > For example, if you do OpenGL on Linux, you use the Mesa library, and so does everybody else. Nvidia has their own OpenGL implementation that replaces Mesa so if you do OpenGL on Linux with Nvidia you are not using Mesa. Which is a good thing since Mesa is lacking in terms of features compared to Nvidia's implementation.
  - simon_o 9y ago
    > Mesa is lacking in terms of features compared to Nvidia's implementation Mesa is open-source. Nvidia can submit patches at any time they want.
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    >Nvidia has their own OpenGL implementation that replaces Mesa so if you do OpenGL on Linux with Nvidia you are not using Mesa. Which is a good thing since Mesa is lacking in terms of features compared to Nvidia's implementation. Ironic statement, given that the article is specifically about how Nvidia proprietary drivers are lacking in features compared to the Mesa stack.
jejones3141 9y ago
Nvidia could be documenting their product so they wouldn't have to throw more people and money at Linux support.

shmerl 9y ago

> If you're a Linux user and NVIDIA doesn't do what you want it to do, then that's fine as well - vote with your wallet and buy from someone else. That's exactly what's happening. But the other side of the coin is, that in order to switch, the other choice should be good enough. Until recently, AMD had too many downsides, that many were ready to suffer through Nvidia's problems. But that is changing now. You can observe the trend here (it's not a big sample yet, but it's still showing the trend): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends Note: you need to click "trends" there to display change over time.

rodgerd 9y ago

> I kind of sympathise with NVIDIA in all this Nvidia are toxic arseholes whose business practises are on a par with 90s Microsoft - funding games studios to deliver crippled-on-AMD games, for example. They deserve bankruptcy, not sympathy.

danieldk 9y ago

Whereas in Linuxland, they've got a kernel, a billion side-projects that may or may not be widely used and they all want NVIDIA to conform the THEIR way of doing things, an angry Finnish gentleman who just shouts and swears at things he doesn't like, and a largely non-gaming and very fragmented user base that could be using any number of desktop environments/kernel versions/drivers etc. There is one big elephant in the room here that you are missing and that is GPU computing. This is probably a big market for them now (Teslas go for a couple of thousand a pop) and the vast majority of it is on Linux. Their ecosystem with CUDA and CuDNN is pretty awesome, on the other hand, their driver has issues. At any rate, it's a market that they cannot afford to lose. As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing they may not have a lock on the market as they have now.

ktta 9y ago
>As OpenCL support for e.g. machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow is progressing I wonder if the complex OpenCL API throws off many ML developers. Also I think they tend to focus on CUDA because there is much less chance of it breaking between devices. OTOH, each vendor has their own .so for OpenCL and they usually tend to be buggy and stay a point version or two behind. This is the explanation I tell myself when I wonder why the hell Google chose CUDA over OpenCL.
- thawkins 9y ago
  Also, on machines with mixed intel/nvidia setuos, why cant i use the intel solely for display and the nvidia soley for compute,why does the gpu have to be tied into the display system, its a pain in tbe ass. To use cuda you almost must make tbe gpu work as a display system.
  - ktta 9y ago
    You should be able to do that. You can use the Nvidia GPU in a 'headless' mode.
    - 9y ago

sjellis 9y ago

You are mistaking the variety of desktops with a variety of graphics stacks (which there aren't). At the levels of the stack that nVidia work at, there are only a small number of options (sometimes one), maintained by specialist developers who work closely together, and more or less share one long-term roadmap. For example, if you do OpenGL on Linux, you use the Mesa library, and so does everybody else. If you care about protocols, X11 is the legacy standard that everybody used to work with, and Wayland is the agreed replacement. We swear at nVidia because Intel developers have been good members of the community for years, and AMD have made an effort to become constructive participants. nVidia still aren't.

badsectoracula 9y ago
> For example, if you do OpenGL on Linux, you use the Mesa library, and so does everybody else. Nvidia has their own OpenGL implementation that replaces Mesa so if you do OpenGL on Linux with Nvidia you are not using Mesa. Which is a good thing since Mesa is lacking in terms of features compared to Nvidia's implementation.
- simon_o 9y ago
  > Mesa is lacking in terms of features compared to Nvidia's implementation Mesa is open-source. Nvidia can submit patches at any time they want.
- Qwertious 9y ago
  >Nvidia has their own OpenGL implementation that replaces Mesa so if you do OpenGL on Linux with Nvidia you are not using Mesa. Which is a good thing since Mesa is lacking in terms of features compared to Nvidia's implementation. Ironic statement, given that the article is specifically about how Nvidia proprietary drivers are lacking in features compared to the Mesa stack.

jejones3141 9y ago

Nvidia could be documenting their product so they wouldn't have to throw more people and money at Linux support.