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I care about freedom more than most people using Linux these days. But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their

I care about freedom more than most people using Linux these days. But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their closed driver. That's a sad fact. I've been on Linux "desktop" since 1995 or so. There are only two businesses that really gave much of a crap about Linux (other than Red Hat) and those were: id Software and Nvidia. ATI had total garbage for drivers for many many years. Practically up until AMD bought them. I built a HTPC back in 2005 around a passively-cooled ATI card trying to get it silent as possible. The idea was that I would use the Radeon driver on Linux and everything would just work. But it didn't. And I was stuck using Windows. ATI shares part of the blame for why Linux never made it on the desktop. You can't have one of the two major video card vendors dropping the ball for so long and come out okay.

freedomben 5y ago
I agree with you, and I hate it, because Nvidia causes me so many headaches. I've been a full time linux user for a little over 10 years now. I refuse to buy a system with an nvidia card now, because that damn proprietary driver and nvidia's slow moving way of not supporting newest kernels or wayland, makes life hell. I could have avoided some of that pain by sticking with a slow moving or older distro like CentOS, but that brings many other problems. I'm grateful for Nvidia for doing what they do, but I'm pretty stoked for my new AMD card that will get my system back to where I don't have major crashes one to two times per day.
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josteink 5y ago
> But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their closed driver. Intel Integrated graphics has been around for a long time now, it has open drivers and since its first release, it has been more than adequate for most non-gamers. Maybe that's just me, but I don't really care that much about NVidia or ATI/AMD, and the state of their drives don't impact my ability to meaningfully use Linux on the desktop.

freedomben 5y ago

I agree with you, and I hate it, because Nvidia causes me so many headaches. I've been a full time linux user for a little over 10 years now. I refuse to buy a system with an nvidia card now, because that damn proprietary driver and nvidia's slow moving way of not supporting newest kernels or wayland, makes life hell. I could have avoided some of that pain by sticking with a slow moving or older distro like CentOS, but that brings many other problems. I'm grateful for Nvidia for doing what they do, but I'm pretty stoked for my new AMD card that will get my system back to where I don't have major crashes one to two times per day.

deleted 5y ago

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josteink 5y ago

> But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their closed driver. Intel Integrated graphics has been around for a long time now, it has open drivers and since its first release, it has been more than adequate for most non-gamers. Maybe that's just me, but I don't really care that much about NVidia or ATI/AMD, and the state of their drives don't impact my ability to meaningfully use Linux on the desktop.