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> I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. May I suggest you buy an

> I would use Wayland, but the most actively-developed tiling window manager, sway, doesn't work with the NVIDIA graphics card I own. May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around; not only because they didn't try to impose their "standard" (which virtually nobody other than them implements, as far as I can tell) without implementing the de-facto standard interface, hurting their customers' access to Wayland to this day... but also because AMD will probably be better value next time you're in the market for a GPU. > That last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers. Sway is based on such a library! (wlroots) However, again, NVIDIA has made it an extra effort to support their GPUs (both in applications and in compositors), and I'm not sure anyone wants to go to extra effort to support a vendor who actively impedes development. By all means, if you want to do NVIDIA's job, be my guest. I think Sir_Cmpwn has a point in not putting in that effort though.

csande17 7y ago
> By all means, if you want to do NVIDIA's job, be my guest. If I wrote an X compositor that supported NVIDIA's proprietary interface, it would work with pretty much every window manager that's ever been written. If I patch wlroots to support NVIDIA, I'll still only be able to use window managers based on wlroots; I won't be able to use ones that spun the Wheel of Incompatible Wayland Compositor Libraries and landed on Weston, swc, Orbment, or whatever GNOME uses instead.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  This is why it was so infuriating when NVIDIA refused to implement the stanadrd interface: they made the ecosystem "fragmented" for their users, and the PR cost of that bears on the compositor writers, rather than NVIDIA. Having different compositors at the level they're at allows a lot more interesting innovations to be made, and aside from NVIDIA's tomfoolery, it has not caused significant inconsistency. Everyone uses libinput, almost everyone uses colord, and everyone implements GBM. Wayland is substantially different from X, and the ways in which it is different are good. NVIDIA did the one thing we needed people not to do.
  - orbifold 7y ago
    Have you considered that maybe it is the other way around: The standardised solution is inferior and NVIDIAs superior? Given the fact NVIDIA engineers probably know a lot more about modern graphics stacks than some Redhat employee this seems likely.
    - the_why_of_y 7y ago
      https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patches_merged_into_kwin_does_that/el0yu5n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...
      - orbifold 7y ago
        So the argument it is a bad implementation because it doesn’t work with the Wayland model... maybe that model is broken then.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      Some NVIDIA engineers probably know a lot about graphics stacks; charitably I'd say that those ones aren't the ones tasked with insisting on EGLStreams, which lacks a considerable number of crucial features. To be honest though, NVIDIA engineers do not spend any time engineering graphics stacks at all; they write graphics drivers for stacks that are already largely specified. They're really good at shipping hundreds of megabytes of dirty hack code to patch popular shaders from ISVs to run slightly faster on their hardware, and probably great at writing shader compilers and threaded GL drivers.
      - orbifold 7y ago
        Instead of repeating arguments made elsewhere maybe this post sheds some light on why EGLStreams are a superior solution: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/925605/linux/nvidia-364-12-release-vulkan-glvnd-drm-kms-and-eglstreams/ https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/925605/linux/nvidia...
the_pwner224 7y ago
> May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around This doesn't help anyone. I bought an expensive Nvidia GPU 6 years ago, when AMD support on Linux was really bad. What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems? I've had 6 years to experience the horrors of Nvidia, on multiple machines. I'm never going to buy one of their cards again unless there's a massive change in their leadership. But telling people 'tough luck; basic functionality that your computers have been capable of doing for decades will no longer work because you bought the wrong brand' is simply unacceptable.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems? If you want to replace a card which was expensive six years ago, you can spend a hell of a lot less than five hundred dollars to do so. Even a brand-new RX 570, which will outperform a GTX 770 (the highest performance GPU for $500USD or less in 2013), should only cost you about $130USD today. If you're okay with pre-owned cards, you can get better than that for the same money. > This doesn't help anyone. It helps people who are in the market for a new GPU, who want it to work well with Linux, especially the cutting-edge stuff. Even in 2013 though, I think I was able to run Wayland on a discrete AMD GPU (Terascale 2 or 3?) with at least OpenGL 3.3 available; and it worked OK. I don't think AMD got that working more recently than 2013. I can understand not wanting AMD's cards on the top end as ca. 2013 (since they were not competitive, IIRC), but now they do have competitive offerings, and their support for desktop Linux is incomparably better, which is why I suggest people go with them. I don't get why I'm getting flak here.
  - simion314 7y ago
    Not OP, but you are missing this points: 1 the expensive(this is relative) card works fine, do I throw it or donate it without any good reason(switching to wayland could wait IMO until this card is too obsolete) 2 Buying a new GPU is a big investment for some people,those money could be used to replace an old low quality display or other stuff.

csande17 7y ago

> By all means, if you want to do NVIDIA's job, be my guest. If I wrote an X compositor that supported NVIDIA's proprietary interface, it would work with pretty much every window manager that's ever been written. If I patch wlroots to support NVIDIA, I'll still only be able to use window managers based on wlroots; I won't be able to use ones that spun the Wheel of Incompatible Wayland Compositor Libraries and landed on Weston, swc, Orbment, or whatever GNOME uses instead.

microcolonel 7y ago
This is why it was so infuriating when NVIDIA refused to implement the stanadrd interface: they made the ecosystem "fragmented" for their users, and the PR cost of that bears on the compositor writers, rather than NVIDIA. Having different compositors at the level they're at allows a lot more interesting innovations to be made, and aside from NVIDIA's tomfoolery, it has not caused significant inconsistency. Everyone uses libinput, almost everyone uses colord, and everyone implements GBM. Wayland is substantially different from X, and the ways in which it is different are good. NVIDIA did the one thing we needed people not to do.
- orbifold 7y ago
  Have you considered that maybe it is the other way around: The standardised solution is inferior and NVIDIAs superior? Given the fact NVIDIA engineers probably know a lot more about modern graphics stacks than some Redhat employee this seems likely.
  - the_why_of_y 7y ago
    https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patches_merged_into_kwin_does_that/el0yu5n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bdip8a/nvidias_patch...
    - orbifold 7y ago
      So the argument it is a bad implementation because it doesn’t work with the Wayland model... maybe that model is broken then.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Some NVIDIA engineers probably know a lot about graphics stacks; charitably I'd say that those ones aren't the ones tasked with insisting on EGLStreams, which lacks a considerable number of crucial features. To be honest though, NVIDIA engineers do not spend any time engineering graphics stacks at all; they write graphics drivers for stacks that are already largely specified. They're really good at shipping hundreds of megabytes of dirty hack code to patch popular shaders from ISVs to run slightly faster on their hardware, and probably great at writing shader compilers and threaded GL drivers.
    - orbifold 7y ago
      Instead of repeating arguments made elsewhere maybe this post sheds some light on why EGLStreams are a superior solution: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/925605/linux/nvidia-364-12-release-vulkan-glvnd-drm-kms-and-eglstreams/ https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/925605/linux/nvidia...

the_pwner224 7y ago

> May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around This doesn't help anyone. I bought an expensive Nvidia GPU 6 years ago, when AMD support on Linux was really bad. What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems? I've had 6 years to experience the horrors of Nvidia, on multiple machines. I'm never going to buy one of their cards again unless there's a massive change in their leadership. But telling people 'tough luck; basic functionality that your computers have been capable of doing for decades will no longer work because you bought the wrong brand' is simply unacceptable.

microcolonel 7y ago
> What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems? If you want to replace a card which was expensive six years ago, you can spend a hell of a lot less than five hundred dollars to do so. Even a brand-new RX 570, which will outperform a GTX 770 (the highest performance GPU for $500USD or less in 2013), should only cost you about $130USD today. If you're okay with pre-owned cards, you can get better than that for the same money. > This doesn't help anyone. It helps people who are in the market for a new GPU, who want it to work well with Linux, especially the cutting-edge stuff. Even in 2013 though, I think I was able to run Wayland on a discrete AMD GPU (Terascale 2 or 3?) with at least OpenGL 3.3 available; and it worked OK. I don't think AMD got that working more recently than 2013. I can understand not wanting AMD's cards on the top end as ca. 2013 (since they were not competitive, IIRC), but now they do have competitive offerings, and their support for desktop Linux is incomparably better, which is why I suggest people go with them. I don't get why I'm getting flak here.
- simion314 7y ago
  Not OP, but you are missing this points: 1 the expensive(this is relative) card works fine, do I throw it or donate it without any good reason(switching to wayland could wait IMO until this card is too obsolete) 2 Buying a new GPU is a big investment for some people,those money could be used to replace an old low quality display or other stuff.