14 ms·

This is a huge shift if it happens. X has been synonymous with GUIs on unix for more than 20 years, and has accumulated all the attendant baggage (both good and

by paol 16y ago

This is a huge shift if it happens. X has been synonymous with GUIs on unix for more than 20 years, and has accumulated all the attendant baggage (both good and bad). There are also some big consequences for the linux landscape. The first and obvious one is that if other distros don't imitate Ubuntu they will drift farther apart. People complain about Ubuntu going their own way now, image what it will be like if they're on Wayland+Unity and others stick to X+Base Gnome. Another, subtler consequence of Shuttleworth's announcement is the message it sends to graphics card vendors (well, NVIDIA really). Wayland is dependent on the newest linux graphics stack, very much by design. But that stack is relatively new (e.g. kernel mode setting) and nvidia never updated their driver architecture to match. I assume this will force their hand because Ubuntu is too big to ignore.

pilom 16y ago
Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?
- notauser 16y ago
  If I was selling software to defense companies I'd support IE6. If I was selling software to primary school teachers I'd support 800x600. If I was selling technology to engineers (especially CUDA types building render farms of thousands of nodes) you can bet your life I'd support Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to give them any reasons at all not to use my stuff everywhere, in case I accidentally opened a niche my competitor could dominate and expand from. These days games are just a part of Nvidia's market.
  - mikebike 16y ago
    None of the mechanical engineering packages (finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics) I've encountered explicitly support Ubuntu. Typically, it's RHEL that is explicitly supported.
    - krschultz 16y ago
      But their driver doesn't have to support Ubuntu, Ubuntu is taking advantage of their driver's OpenGL capability. So the better the Nvidia OpenGL driver, the better Ubuntu will run on it. It shouldn't really matter RHEL or Ubuntu so long as the driver has good OpenGL performance.
      - krakensden 16y ago
        It's more complicated than that- the driver has to support the new KMS driver architecture, where the kernel is in charge of setting up the display and doing draw operations, which the X server used to handle. (Which was why before, you could only have 1 instance of X11 and OpenGL, and switching between virtual terminals took so long) So Wayland won't run on nVidia's (fast) drivers, because they still use the old model where X was in charge of the graphics card.
  - niels_olson 16y ago
    As a military consumer of defense industry products, please, for the love of humanity, do not support IE6. Even NMCI, AHLTA, and SPAWAR now support at least IE7. A fair chunk of the Army and Air Force are now Vista and Win7. As the father of 8 and 5 year-olds, please don't support 800x600. Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays.
    - loboman 16y ago
      Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays. That, in the US. I think it's different in other countries.
  - GFischer 16y ago
    25% of the users at my company's website (largest private insurer in my country) have an 800x600 resolution. About 50% have 1024x768. Of the remainder, a significant number have 1024x600 resolution. It's a 3rd world country, so tech adoption is significantly slower, but you have to consider that not all sites have the same readership (in this case, we have people that still consider typewriters to be acceptable tech).
- paol 16y ago
  Uh, NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago. Within that ecosystem, Ubuntu is too big to ignore.
  - levesque 16y ago
    NVIDIA kind of supports Linux as a family of distro. There is only one driver for ALL the Linux distros out there, which is nice, keeps things simple for them. If they need to wrap out a second series of drivers just for Ubuntu and Wayland, I'm not sure it's going to be quality material. Anyway, anything would be better than the current NVIDIA drivers, which are crappy as hell in my book. Now is this because X is also crappy, I can't tell.
  - sielskr 16y ago
    "NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago." NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?
    - forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
      "NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?" Yes, I think they are because of contracts with big guys that need Linux on things like supercomputers(almost all of them have linux inside).
      - azim 16y ago
        Interestingly enough, a lot of developers argue that Nvidia and ATI are in violation of of the GPL by releasing proprietary drivers for Linux. The language is unclear on whether or not the kernel's GPL license extends to kernel loadable modules or not, many say it does.
  - sedachv 16y ago
    "As NVIDIA did not release all the needed documentation for its graphics chip, the development is under the nouveau project which uses reverse engineering to get it to work. Nouveau has been pulled to 2.6.33 kernel. This will allow to use kernel-based mode-setting for NVIDIA cards with this driver." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting That's some heavy commitment to support Linux right there.
- krschultz 16y ago
  That 5% number is meaningless. Lets start with what percent of all people who own computers have a Nvidia graphics card. Considering that the mass bulk of computers have a crappy integrated chipset, and there is also ATI/AMD out there, I can safely say <50%. Among those 50% what percent are Linux users? Wouldn't it be expected the kind of people enthused enough to buy a discrete graphics card are also the kind of people with the interest to try Linux? I imagine it is a number higher than 5%, maybe only 10 or 15%, but it is higher.
  - akho 16y ago
    No, it wouldn’t. Gamers buy discrete cards. Gamers do not use Linux. (In fact, I’m having trouble coming up with a reason for a desktop Linux user to buy a discrete graphics card)
    - junkbit 16y ago
      Nvidia is really pushing CUDA and OpenCL these days. If you follow the developer conferences the graphics feels like less of a priority to them.
krschultz 16y ago
I don't mind the distros splitting apart. There are so many distros out there with so little difference between them it is kind of pointless. But if they start heading in somewhat different directions it will be more interesting. If we're not going to have crazy differentiation, then it should just converge to one true distro and concentrate the development effort on making that distro better.
naner 16y ago
It will be several years before we need to worry about that. Nvidia's drivers actually replace a huge chunk of the Xorg graphics stack because it has sucked so terribly[1] for many years. 1: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on...
- pyre 16y ago
  That must be why XMonad has funky artifacting on window borders when a monitor is rotated under the Nvidia drivers. I could never understand that (as it works fine when the monitors aren't rotated 90deg).
  - bobds 16y ago
    I'd guess that has something to do with different subpixel orientations.
    - pyre 16y ago
      Well, it doesn't happen on other drivers, so the fact that NVidia is replacing a lot of the X11 arcitecture makes sense that they would be the only ones to have this problem.
      - wnoise 16y ago
        It happens for me on the intel drivers.
rikthevik 16y ago
If I never have to see an app with Motif widgets again, I would be a pretty happy guy.

by paol 16y ago

pilom 16y ago

Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?

notauser 16y ago
If I was selling software to defense companies I'd support IE6. If I was selling software to primary school teachers I'd support 800x600. If I was selling technology to engineers (especially CUDA types building render farms of thousands of nodes) you can bet your life I'd support Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to give them any reasons at all not to use my stuff everywhere, in case I accidentally opened a niche my competitor could dominate and expand from. These days games are just a part of Nvidia's market.
- mikebike 16y ago
  None of the mechanical engineering packages (finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics) I've encountered explicitly support Ubuntu. Typically, it's RHEL that is explicitly supported.
  - krschultz 16y ago
    But their driver doesn't have to support Ubuntu, Ubuntu is taking advantage of their driver's OpenGL capability. So the better the Nvidia OpenGL driver, the better Ubuntu will run on it. It shouldn't really matter RHEL or Ubuntu so long as the driver has good OpenGL performance.
    - krakensden 16y ago
      It's more complicated than that- the driver has to support the new KMS driver architecture, where the kernel is in charge of setting up the display and doing draw operations, which the X server used to handle. (Which was why before, you could only have 1 instance of X11 and OpenGL, and switching between virtual terminals took so long) So Wayland won't run on nVidia's (fast) drivers, because they still use the old model where X was in charge of the graphics card.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  As a military consumer of defense industry products, please, for the love of humanity, do not support IE6. Even NMCI, AHLTA, and SPAWAR now support at least IE7. A fair chunk of the Army and Air Force are now Vista and Win7. As the father of 8 and 5 year-olds, please don't support 800x600. Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays.
  - loboman 16y ago
    Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays. That, in the US. I think it's different in other countries.
- GFischer 16y ago
  25% of the users at my company's website (largest private insurer in my country) have an 800x600 resolution. About 50% have 1024x768. Of the remainder, a significant number have 1024x600 resolution. It's a 3rd world country, so tech adoption is significantly slower, but you have to consider that not all sites have the same readership (in this case, we have people that still consider typewriters to be acceptable tech).
paol 16y ago
Uh, NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago. Within that ecosystem, Ubuntu is too big to ignore.
- levesque 16y ago
  NVIDIA kind of supports Linux as a family of distro. There is only one driver for ALL the Linux distros out there, which is nice, keeps things simple for them. If they need to wrap out a second series of drivers just for Ubuntu and Wayland, I'm not sure it's going to be quality material. Anyway, anything would be better than the current NVIDIA drivers, which are crappy as hell in my book. Now is this because X is also crappy, I can't tell.
- sielskr 16y ago
  "NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago." NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?
  - forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
    "NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?" Yes, I think they are because of contracts with big guys that need Linux on things like supercomputers(almost all of them have linux inside).
    - azim 16y ago
      Interestingly enough, a lot of developers argue that Nvidia and ATI are in violation of of the GPL by releasing proprietary drivers for Linux. The language is unclear on whether or not the kernel's GPL license extends to kernel loadable modules or not, many say it does.
- sedachv 16y ago
  "As NVIDIA did not release all the needed documentation for its graphics chip, the development is under the nouveau project which uses reverse engineering to get it to work. Nouveau has been pulled to 2.6.33 kernel. This will allow to use kernel-based mode-setting for NVIDIA cards with this driver." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting That's some heavy commitment to support Linux right there.
krschultz 16y ago
That 5% number is meaningless. Lets start with what percent of all people who own computers have a Nvidia graphics card. Considering that the mass bulk of computers have a crappy integrated chipset, and there is also ATI/AMD out there, I can safely say <50%. Among those 50% what percent are Linux users? Wouldn't it be expected the kind of people enthused enough to buy a discrete graphics card are also the kind of people with the interest to try Linux? I imagine it is a number higher than 5%, maybe only 10 or 15%, but it is higher.
- akho 16y ago
  No, it wouldn’t. Gamers buy discrete cards. Gamers do not use Linux. (In fact, I’m having trouble coming up with a reason for a desktop Linux user to buy a discrete graphics card)
  - junkbit 16y ago
    Nvidia is really pushing CUDA and OpenCL these days. If you follow the developer conferences the graphics feels like less of a priority to them.

krschultz 16y ago

I don't mind the distros splitting apart. There are so many distros out there with so little difference between them it is kind of pointless. But if they start heading in somewhat different directions it will be more interesting. If we're not going to have crazy differentiation, then it should just converge to one true distro and concentrate the development effort on making that distro better.

naner 16y ago

It will be several years before we need to worry about that. Nvidia's drivers actually replace a huge chunk of the Xorg graphics stack because it has sucked so terribly[1] for many years. 1: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on-open-source.html http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on...

pyre 16y ago
That must be why XMonad has funky artifacting on window borders when a monitor is rotated under the Nvidia drivers. I could never understand that (as it works fine when the monitors aren't rotated 90deg).
- bobds 16y ago
  I'd guess that has something to do with different subpixel orientations.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Well, it doesn't happen on other drivers, so the fact that NVidia is replacing a lot of the X11 arcitecture makes sense that they would be the only ones to have this problem.
    - wnoise 16y ago
      It happens for me on the intel drivers.

rikthevik 16y ago

If I never have to see an app with Motif widgets again, I would be a pretty happy guy.