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> So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and maintain

> So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. With respect, my answer is no. I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Yes, they'll have to write several thousand more lines of code, but if you're going to make a desktop environment in 2019, you're going to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have. It would be great if Nvidia had better Linux support! But they don't and washing your desktop platform's hands of the issue just makes the whole project DOA. Are there any competitors to Wayland that don't take a hard-line stance against supporting the most popular and most powerful graphics cards in the world?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Nouveau works. Use it instead. Also: it's possible to have a definition of success which excludes users of the proprietary driver. We don't have the same value system. >the [...] most powerful graphics cards in the world? Citation needed? And the highest of the high end graphics cards are excessive vanity most of the time, you don't need the tip-top to play any modern game at any settings you want.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Working and actually taking advantage of the performance I paid for are two different things. This is a very dismissive attitude that embodies the problem with Wayland. Millions of gamers absolutely do need that acceleration they paid for, it's not "vanity". > We don't have the same value system. I just want a usable Linux desktop that leverages the hardware in my machine. The "values" here seem to be: we acknowledge the extra work required to support mainstream graphics cards, we just don't want to do it and it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    No, they don't. I'm a gamer myself (infrequently these days to be fair). You can have excellent performance with maxed out settings on big ol' 4K displays... on last year's GPUs, which work fine with Nouveau. >it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it. Yes, I'm soooo sorry that I don't want to do free work to help you prop up a company that lives to make me suffer as a developer... I'm clearly exagerrating here but I hope the point is made. Like the article says, just keep using X, I don't care.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      Again, you are completely ignoring people's use cases with smug glib replies. I assure you Nouveau absolutely does not work fine with newer cards, and never will, because those cards are locked into a low power state in Nouveau. (Due to nvidia firmware fuckery). We are talking about 10% (if that) of the performance levels VS the closed drivers. This absolutely, unquestionably, makes a huge amount of intensive 3d software (not only games) completely unusable. If you are wondering why people are pissed about wayland, its precisely awful attitudes like this that sweep aside their real concerns and use cases with broken ideas that don't work, have never worked, and likely never will work. Don't expect people to be on board when you so blatantly don't care about their needs.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        I don't care about their needs. I've made this clear many, many times. But I do care about the needs of many thousands of users who choose not to reward abusive companies by buying their products. You can keep using X with Nvidia. It's not my problem.
        throwaway2048 8y ago
        So perhaps you should complain less when people are hostile about wayland, because this is one of many aspects of how completely inadequate it is as an X11 replacement.
- addisonj 8y ago
  Your work on sway and wlroots is phenomenal, but I feel like there is quite a gap here in terms of why people are concerned about Nvidia support. Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported. While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics. It seems fairly clear with with MacOS focusing less and less on high end machines, there is a gap for high end unix workstations and hopefully desktop Linux can fill that gap, but right now that likely means Nvidia support... I think the best answer is just to buy amd and market forces will get Nvidia to change, but that still doesn't mean everyone can just go that path right now to get their day job done.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    >Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported. Fine. If you do these things, stay on X. >While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics. I honestly just don't care. They should boycott Nvidia and find something else to do with their time if they really want better support from Wayland. I'm not going to bend over for Nvidia. Ever.
    - addisonj 8y ago
      Nor do I think you should, my only point is to say that people's FUD about Wayland often has roots in FOMO about not being able to use the new and shiny for their workflow and no clear path to when/how that will be fixed, regardless of whose "job" it is to fix the problem. The people who demand change are wrong too, I am super happy people like you are doing what you do, otherwise this OSS thing really would never work. But to be clear, while I think your stance is completely reasonable and justified, it is just a hard pill for some people to swallow. That doesn't mean that those who are jerks about it are justified, but it also doesn't mean that those who raise concerns, that those concerns aren't warranted.
- zaro 8y ago
  > Nouveau works. Use it instead. No it doesn't. I have dual GPU laptop Intel UHD 620/Geforce MX 150 and until I blacklist nouveau the laptop is unusable. It either won't boot or when it boots will freeze the system every 30 sec for 10 sec making it unusable.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    So use the Intel GPU instead.
    - zaro 8y ago
      Sure, that's what I am doing anyway. Just wanted to point out that nouveau is not really great option.
- mnd999 8y ago
  > Nouveau works. Use it instead. It works beautifully with sway. Less so with KWin for me at least, although apparently NVIDIA are doing some work to fix that. Reclocking support on recent GPUs is also a problem for anything that wants full performance - they really need to sort that out. I get that this is hard to do. This whole situation is just really annoying and it must be immensely frustrating to be on the end of a lot of the complaints especially when the position of the sway developers not wanting to essentially write it twice just for NVIDIA support is totally reasonable.
bepvte 8y ago
The GNOME project supports nvidia in its current beta
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Awesome! Does it use Nouveau or the Nvidia binary drivers? There's a big difference in performance between the two.
  - erk__ 8y ago
    It works with nvidias driver, recently nvidia began working on some patches for kde as well I belive.
    - odensc 8y ago
      Yep, the aforementioned patch: https://phabricator.kde.org/D18570 https://phabricator.kde.org/D18570
bryanlarsen 8y ago
Nvidia makes many millions each year from CUDA on Linux. If they want to keep biting the hand that feeds them, there are lots of places that would be happy to embrace ROCm once it becomes viable.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Much more likely is that these shops just never install Wayland. I think people are underestimating the switching costs for moving from X to Wayland especially when that move requires buying brand new video cards.
  - ben0x539 8y ago
    I think the average user is going to "switch" to wayland by being handed a new laptop that happens to run a recent-enough gnome that uses wayland as the default.
ken 8y ago
Not even Apple, apparently: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management-doesnt-want-nvidia-support-in-macos-and-thats-a-bad-sign-for-the-mac-pro https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management... As someone who hasn't bought a GPU in several years, but might be in the market for one soon, I have to wonder: what the heck is going on with Nvidia? I remember back in the day, on Linux, they were the graphics card to get if you wanted the highest performance, and could get their proprietary drivers working reliably (I never could). But now they seem to be alienating even closed-source partners. As someone who thinks any GPU made in the past 5 years is more than good enough, avoiding the Nvidia driver situation (on every platform) would be worth the slight performance loss of getting literally any other card.
lbeltrame 8y ago
> I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Well, they should get their act together and work with the rest of the community instead. In KDE, people working in KWin said that they will not support NVIDIA for Wayland, unless NVIDIA itself steps in, proposes a change, gets it approved, and maintains it. That's what they ended up doing so far, although the change hasn't been merged anywhere yet AFAIK.
vetinari 8y ago
> to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have FYI: most people have Intel GPUs. More than both AMD and Nvidia combined (Somewhere around 70%, AMD around 13% and Nvidia around 17%). Intel and AMD are supported, ergo for most people it works just fine. It could work with Nvidia too, if Nvidia were cooperative.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

Nouveau works. Use it instead. Also: it's possible to have a definition of success which excludes users of the proprietary driver. We don't have the same value system. >the [...] most powerful graphics cards in the world? Citation needed? And the highest of the high end graphics cards are excessive vanity most of the time, you don't need the tip-top to play any modern game at any settings you want.

malvosenior 8y ago
Working and actually taking advantage of the performance I paid for are two different things. This is a very dismissive attitude that embodies the problem with Wayland. Millions of gamers absolutely do need that acceleration they paid for, it's not "vanity". > We don't have the same value system. I just want a usable Linux desktop that leverages the hardware in my machine. The "values" here seem to be: we acknowledge the extra work required to support mainstream graphics cards, we just don't want to do it and it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  No, they don't. I'm a gamer myself (infrequently these days to be fair). You can have excellent performance with maxed out settings on big ol' 4K displays... on last year's GPUs, which work fine with Nouveau. >it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it. Yes, I'm soooo sorry that I don't want to do free work to help you prop up a company that lives to make me suffer as a developer... I'm clearly exagerrating here but I hope the point is made. Like the article says, just keep using X, I don't care.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Again, you are completely ignoring people's use cases with smug glib replies. I assure you Nouveau absolutely does not work fine with newer cards, and never will, because those cards are locked into a low power state in Nouveau. (Due to nvidia firmware fuckery). We are talking about 10% (if that) of the performance levels VS the closed drivers. This absolutely, unquestionably, makes a huge amount of intensive 3d software (not only games) completely unusable. If you are wondering why people are pissed about wayland, its precisely awful attitudes like this that sweep aside their real concerns and use cases with broken ideas that don't work, have never worked, and likely never will work. Don't expect people to be on board when you so blatantly don't care about their needs.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      I don't care about their needs. I've made this clear many, many times. But I do care about the needs of many thousands of users who choose not to reward abusive companies by buying their products. You can keep using X with Nvidia. It's not my problem.
      - throwaway2048 8y ago
        So perhaps you should complain less when people are hostile about wayland, because this is one of many aspects of how completely inadequate it is as an X11 replacement.
addisonj 8y ago
Your work on sway and wlroots is phenomenal, but I feel like there is quite a gap here in terms of why people are concerned about Nvidia support. Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported. While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics. It seems fairly clear with with MacOS focusing less and less on high end machines, there is a gap for high end unix workstations and hopefully desktop Linux can fill that gap, but right now that likely means Nvidia support... I think the best answer is just to buy amd and market forces will get Nvidia to change, but that still doesn't mean everyone can just go that path right now to get their day job done.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  >Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported. Fine. If you do these things, stay on X. >While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics. I honestly just don't care. They should boycott Nvidia and find something else to do with their time if they really want better support from Wayland. I'm not going to bend over for Nvidia. Ever.
  - addisonj 8y ago
    Nor do I think you should, my only point is to say that people's FUD about Wayland often has roots in FOMO about not being able to use the new and shiny for their workflow and no clear path to when/how that will be fixed, regardless of whose "job" it is to fix the problem. The people who demand change are wrong too, I am super happy people like you are doing what you do, otherwise this OSS thing really would never work. But to be clear, while I think your stance is completely reasonable and justified, it is just a hard pill for some people to swallow. That doesn't mean that those who are jerks about it are justified, but it also doesn't mean that those who raise concerns, that those concerns aren't warranted.
zaro 8y ago
> Nouveau works. Use it instead. No it doesn't. I have dual GPU laptop Intel UHD 620/Geforce MX 150 and until I blacklist nouveau the laptop is unusable. It either won't boot or when it boots will freeze the system every 30 sec for 10 sec making it unusable.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  So use the Intel GPU instead.
  - zaro 8y ago
    Sure, that's what I am doing anyway. Just wanted to point out that nouveau is not really great option.
mnd999 8y ago
> Nouveau works. Use it instead. It works beautifully with sway. Less so with KWin for me at least, although apparently NVIDIA are doing some work to fix that. Reclocking support on recent GPUs is also a problem for anything that wants full performance - they really need to sort that out. I get that this is hard to do. This whole situation is just really annoying and it must be immensely frustrating to be on the end of a lot of the complaints especially when the position of the sway developers not wanting to essentially write it twice just for NVIDIA support is totally reasonable.

bepvte 8y ago

The GNOME project supports nvidia in its current beta

malvosenior 8y ago
Awesome! Does it use Nouveau or the Nvidia binary drivers? There's a big difference in performance between the two.
- erk__ 8y ago
  It works with nvidias driver, recently nvidia began working on some patches for kde as well I belive.
  - odensc 8y ago
    Yep, the aforementioned patch: https://phabricator.kde.org/D18570 https://phabricator.kde.org/D18570

bryanlarsen 8y ago

Nvidia makes many millions each year from CUDA on Linux. If they want to keep biting the hand that feeds them, there are lots of places that would be happy to embrace ROCm once it becomes viable.

malvosenior 8y ago
Much more likely is that these shops just never install Wayland. I think people are underestimating the switching costs for moving from X to Wayland especially when that move requires buying brand new video cards.
- ben0x539 8y ago
  I think the average user is going to "switch" to wayland by being handed a new laptop that happens to run a recent-enough gnome that uses wayland as the default.

ken 8y ago

Not even Apple, apparently: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management-doesnt-want-nvidia-support-in-macos-and-thats-a-bad-sign-for-the-mac-pro https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management... As someone who hasn't bought a GPU in several years, but might be in the market for one soon, I have to wonder: what the heck is going on with Nvidia? I remember back in the day, on Linux, they were the graphics card to get if you wanted the highest performance, and could get their proprietary drivers working reliably (I never could). But now they seem to be alienating even closed-source partners. As someone who thinks any GPU made in the past 5 years is more than good enough, avoiding the Nvidia driver situation (on every platform) would be worth the slight performance loss of getting literally any other card.

lbeltrame 8y ago

> I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Well, they should get their act together and work with the rest of the community instead. In KDE, people working in KWin said that they will not support NVIDIA for Wayland, unless NVIDIA itself steps in, proposes a change, gets it approved, and maintains it. That's what they ended up doing so far, although the change hasn't been merged anywhere yet AFAIK.

vetinari 8y ago

> to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have FYI: most people have Intel GPUs. More than both AMD and Nvidia combined (Somewhere around 70%, AMD around 13% and Nvidia around 17%). Intel and AMD are supported, ergo for most people it works just fine. It could work with Nvidia too, if Nvidia were cooperative.