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If you're trying to do anything with the latest hardware, it's always going to be a pain on Linux. Even Windows doesn't have flawless support with every game on

If you're trying to do anything with the latest hardware, it's always going to be a pain on Linux. Even Windows doesn't have flawless support with every game on day one. > It’s quite common to have a bit of trouble getting anything working, and you will run into problems far more often than with any other brand of GPU (which will just work perfectly). That's a joke. I've been using Linux on Nvidia since the Riva TNT. It was always Radeon that had garbage drivers and really didn't give two shits about Linux. Not sure how much this has changed with AMD owning them, but I never bothered to look at Radeon since Nvidia was always the best card and always worked. It's almost never more than just doing a single package install. > software has to be written against the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, rather than using the standard tools that everything else uses like OpenGL and Mesa. I think you fundamentally do not understand Mesa or OpenGL to say this. And no, nothing has to be "written against" Nvidia. It's literally OpenGL (or Vulkan, today). Unless you're talking CUDA or something, which I don't touch. This all just sounds like so much FUD that you wrote.

chrismorgan 6y ago
I certainly don’t understand all that I’m writing of—it’s based purely on what I’ve read, which has mostly been casual rather than deliberate research. It’s almost certain that I’ve made errors. I’m referring to things like the Background section of https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA: > The proprietary NVIDIA doesn't provide the same user space API as the open source drivers. While the open source drivers allows the display server to use the Generic Buffer Manager (gbm) and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) APIs to manage hardware buffers, set modes, and queue page flips, configure hardware planes, the NVIDIA driver forces the display server to treat it differently. Instead of these APIs, the compositor uses a combination of KMS, to set modes, and EGL (EGLDevice & EGLStream extensions to be precise) to indirectly queue page flips by linking an EGLSurface, corresponding to an area of the screen, with a CRTC of an EGLDevice, using an EGLStream. My OpenGL and Mesa remarks are very probably wrong. The impression that I have received is that the window manager is probably the main thing that needs to be aware of these differences and NVIDIA ignoring the standards (this is why Sway doesn’t support NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html), but that anything wanting to actually use GPU capabilities may well need to be aware as well. — What I have heard on the GPU drivers situation is that Radeon used to be terrible (and NVIDIA less terrible despite doing things its own way rather than the standard way), but that they overhauled it all completely so that for at least the last five years it’s been great.

chrismorgan 6y ago

I certainly don’t understand all that I’m writing of—it’s based purely on what I’ve read, which has mostly been casual rather than deliberate research. It’s almost certain that I’ve made errors. I’m referring to things like the Background section of https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA: > The proprietary NVIDIA doesn't provide the same user space API as the open source drivers. While the open source drivers allows the display server to use the Generic Buffer Manager (gbm) and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) APIs to manage hardware buffers, set modes, and queue page flips, configure hardware planes, the NVIDIA driver forces the display server to treat it differently. Instead of these APIs, the compositor uses a combination of KMS, to set modes, and EGL (EGLDevice & EGLStream extensions to be precise) to indirectly queue page flips by linking an EGLSurface, corresponding to an area of the screen, with a CRTC of an EGLDevice, using an EGLStream. My OpenGL and Mesa remarks are very probably wrong. The impression that I have received is that the window manager is probably the main thing that needs to be aware of these differences and NVIDIA ignoring the standards (this is why Sway doesn’t support NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html), but that anything wanting to actually use GPU capabilities may well need to be aware as well. — What I have heard on the GPU drivers situation is that Radeon used to be terrible (and NVIDIA less terrible despite doing things its own way rather than the standard way), but that they overhauled it all completely so that for at least the last five years it’s been great.