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Wayland developers, who are not GPU reverse-engineers.

jchw 7y ago
Sure, but they already know this. You or anyone else on Hacker News is not clarifying this for them. Meanwhile, telling users who to blame does nothing for them. They don’t care. To them, the best entity to blame is the distribution, that’s pretty much their job. But while blame doesn’t fix problems, neither does doing nothing. What I’m suggesting is, the move to Wayland needs to be pushed harder if anything is going to be fixed. Nvidia can’t hold it back, that’s not sustainable. But again, users can’t do that. Distributions can do that. Distributions can tell people, sorry, we can’t support Nvidia, contact Nvidia, they already promised to work towards this, and what they produced is incomplete. If they continue to support X11, there's no urgency to fixing the issues with Wayland. This isn’t really about blame though, it’s about responsibility. Somebody has to fix the problem. Open source projects like Nouveau can help, but Nvidia has blocked progress by requiring signed blobs and continually not providing access to important information (like technical bits for reclocking.) I think that is pretty much reason enough to suggest Nvidia should be shouldering the pressure and responsibility to deliver a good Linux experience, and we should absolutely hold them to it, until or if they stop blocking open source efforts on purpose. Establishing blame would tell you who’s fault it is that something is broken. Answer is nearly useless imo. Only thing that matters is how do we fix it and possibly what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Saying Nvidia should fix it is different from worrying about who is to blame; if you frame it that way, they could fire back about how kernel licensing restrictions make their life harder, and nobody cares about that issue either.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  > "Meanwhile, telling users who to blame does nothing for them. They don’t care. To them, the best entity to blame is the distribution, that’s pretty much their job." I think there is value in telling users to vent their frustration in a productive direction; namely at Nvidia who has the power to change the situation, rather than at Wayland developers who are likely just as frustrated. I think we both generally agree on that.
  - jchw 7y ago
    Yeah, Nvidia is the right entity to bother no doubt, I just have a different idea of the tone and attitude. The approach I’ve seen before feels more like guiding an angry mob. I’m not really an expert but I feel what we need is firm decisions (drop support, it’s time) and clear messaging (vote with your wallet, and tell Nvidia you need this.) Apple dropped support for Nvidia graphics. Linux will be next at this rate. Still, I want to shy away from blame. Blame is complicated, can be deflected, and often leads to hatred. I prefer to say, Nvidia is responsible, nobody else can fix this.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      NVidia sales hardly suffer from it. In what regards Linux, the only customers that matter to NVidia are CUDA users (don't care about their UI on cloud instances) and Hollywood studios (have their own in-house distributions).

jchw 7y ago

Sure, but they already know this. You or anyone else on Hacker News is not clarifying this for them. Meanwhile, telling users who to blame does nothing for them. They don’t care. To them, the best entity to blame is the distribution, that’s pretty much their job. But while blame doesn’t fix problems, neither does doing nothing. What I’m suggesting is, the move to Wayland needs to be pushed harder if anything is going to be fixed. Nvidia can’t hold it back, that’s not sustainable. But again, users can’t do that. Distributions can do that. Distributions can tell people, sorry, we can’t support Nvidia, contact Nvidia, they already promised to work towards this, and what they produced is incomplete. If they continue to support X11, there's no urgency to fixing the issues with Wayland. This isn’t really about blame though, it’s about responsibility. Somebody has to fix the problem. Open source projects like Nouveau can help, but Nvidia has blocked progress by requiring signed blobs and continually not providing access to important information (like technical bits for reclocking.) I think that is pretty much reason enough to suggest Nvidia should be shouldering the pressure and responsibility to deliver a good Linux experience, and we should absolutely hold them to it, until or if they stop blocking open source efforts on purpose. Establishing blame would tell you who’s fault it is that something is broken. Answer is nearly useless imo. Only thing that matters is how do we fix it and possibly what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Saying Nvidia should fix it is different from worrying about who is to blame; if you frame it that way, they could fire back about how kernel licensing restrictions make their life harder, and nobody cares about that issue either.

darkpuma 7y ago
> "Meanwhile, telling users who to blame does nothing for them. They don’t care. To them, the best entity to blame is the distribution, that’s pretty much their job." I think there is value in telling users to vent their frustration in a productive direction; namely at Nvidia who has the power to change the situation, rather than at Wayland developers who are likely just as frustrated. I think we both generally agree on that.
- jchw 7y ago
  Yeah, Nvidia is the right entity to bother no doubt, I just have a different idea of the tone and attitude. The approach I’ve seen before feels more like guiding an angry mob. I’m not really an expert but I feel what we need is firm decisions (drop support, it’s time) and clear messaging (vote with your wallet, and tell Nvidia you need this.) Apple dropped support for Nvidia graphics. Linux will be next at this rate. Still, I want to shy away from blame. Blame is complicated, can be deflected, and often leads to hatred. I prefer to say, Nvidia is responsible, nobody else can fix this.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    NVidia sales hardly suffer from it. In what regards Linux, the only customers that matter to NVidia are CUDA users (don't care about their UI on cloud instances) and Hollywood studios (have their own in-house distributions).