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> A vast majority of the Linux desktop ecosystem has been on NVIDIA graphics cards Source? Nvidia's proprietary, closed drivers and the moving target that com

> A vast majority of the Linux desktop ecosystem has been on NVIDIA graphics cards Source? Nvidia's proprietary, closed drivers and the moving target that comes with that means I avoid Nvidia graphics hardware at all costs and I'd thought it was widely known their cards aren't great if Linux is the primary use for your hardware. (Linux is my daily driver and I also develop on/with it, but I don't game at all)

LoganDark 3y ago
Usually it's because someone bought a non-Linux computer that came with Nvidia, or they wanted/needed CUDA for some reason, as there's not yet a very good equivalent for AMD (ROCm is not a CUDA equivalent). It is already quite widely known that Nvidia is not necessarily great for Linux desktops. I know people who bought entirely separate AMD graphics cards just to drive their display even if they still needed the Nvidia GPU for compute. It's usually possible to get Nvidia displays working, but the experience isn't nearly as good as with AMD.
jchw 3y ago
Exact figures are hard to come by, but vary from 60-85%; Steam says around 75%[1]. NVIDIA proprietary drivers were immensely popular on both Linux and BSD in the early 2000s when I first got into Linux, and having tried the then-closed source ATI drivers a singular time, I can absolutely attest to why: ATI and NVIDIA were basically the only serious desktop GPU options at the time, and the closed source, I believe Catalyst? drivers were as good as junk. Almost everything about them screamed fucking useless. For a really long time, they defaulted to setting multihead systems up with multiple X displays instead of Xinerama by default, which is so unbelievably user-hostile; it sounds okay on paper, but if you've ever used X with multiple separate displays, you'll understand that it stopped making sense literally the moment Xinerama existed, and it was already quite a thing the late 90s. But after I set up Xinerama, the problems continued into every other aspect of the desktop. In that era, where you pretty much always needed discrete graphics, NVIDIA was your Linux option. No doubt that it's going to change so as long as NVIDIA's Linux desktop support continues to stagnate, or at least stagnate moreso than it adapts. (I have not used NVIDIA on Linux as a daily driver for five years. I tried it again when the open source kernel driver came around, but quickly switched back after realizing it still wasn't stable enough in Sway or KDE.) [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- i2cmaster 3y ago
  Steam is going to be heavily skewed Nvidia since many games either need it or run poorly without it. Gamers seem to tolerate an otherwise nearly unusable computer for Nvidia graphics acceleration where most users won't.
  - jchw 3y ago
    Steam merely confirms what I already knew as a long-term Linux user: when it comes to discrete GPUs, NVIDIA has long been the biggest player. This isn't just Linux-specific either, NVIDIA commands a large portion of the GPU market period. Forgetting gamers, NVIDIA has the most robust options for hardware acceleration in many cases, especially for AI use cases like PyTorch, and a lot of productivity tools like Blender. ROCm and HAP exist, but AMD has often struggled to gain widespread support. If there's any strong evidence that NVIDIA still isn't winning in Linux desktop marketshare, I'd certainly be interested to hear it, and it would be news to me. I can imagine Intel technically has a lot of marketshare due to laptops, but then again, Intel and NVIDIA users are hardly mutually exclusive on laptops, either.
    - i2cmaster 3y ago
      I highly doubt the majority of Linux users have Steam installed, especially the kinds that don't tolerate Nvidia's drivers.
      - jchw 3y ago
        I don't really believe the majority of desktop Linux users have Steam installed. I do believe that the majority of Linux users historically (at least leading into the 2010s) used NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, for a multitude of reasons. Even today where AMD and Intel GPUs are clearly the better option for stability, that doesn't mean they're the best option for doing work with. If anything, gaming on AMD is pretty comparable today, in part thanks to Valve. Productivity on AMD is where things are not in good shape. I wish it weren't so, but compare the CUDA and OpenCL/ROCm ecosystems and it's pretty obvious. Most recently, when AMD released some pretty enticing GPU options into the market, ROCm users were surprised to find that their cards either were entirely unsupported, or support had not yet been stabilized. That's just not how things work with CUDA. I'd pay for things to get better here. I desperately hope that Vulkan as an option for compute can mature and compete with CUDA, but I also think that to do so, quite an ecosystem will need to be built up around it, even if the API and drivers prove sufficient to work as a solid runtime.

LoganDark 3y ago

Usually it's because someone bought a non-Linux computer that came with Nvidia, or they wanted/needed CUDA for some reason, as there's not yet a very good equivalent for AMD (ROCm is not a CUDA equivalent). It is already quite widely known that Nvidia is not necessarily great for Linux desktops. I know people who bought entirely separate AMD graphics cards just to drive their display even if they still needed the Nvidia GPU for compute. It's usually possible to get Nvidia displays working, but the experience isn't nearly as good as with AMD.

jchw 3y ago

Exact figures are hard to come by, but vary from 60-85%; Steam says around 75%[1]. NVIDIA proprietary drivers were immensely popular on both Linux and BSD in the early 2000s when I first got into Linux, and having tried the then-closed source ATI drivers a singular time, I can absolutely attest to why: ATI and NVIDIA were basically the only serious desktop GPU options at the time, and the closed source, I believe Catalyst? drivers were as good as junk. Almost everything about them screamed fucking useless. For a really long time, they defaulted to setting multihead systems up with multiple X displays instead of Xinerama by default, which is so unbelievably user-hostile; it sounds okay on paper, but if you've ever used X with multiple separate displays, you'll understand that it stopped making sense literally the moment Xinerama existed, and it was already quite a thing the late 90s. But after I set up Xinerama, the problems continued into every other aspect of the desktop. In that era, where you pretty much always needed discrete graphics, NVIDIA was your Linux option. No doubt that it's going to change so as long as NVIDIA's Linux desktop support continues to stagnate, or at least stagnate moreso than it adapts. (I have not used NVIDIA on Linux as a daily driver for five years. I tried it again when the open source kernel driver came around, but quickly switched back after realizing it still wasn't stable enough in Sway or KDE.) [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

i2cmaster 3y ago
Steam is going to be heavily skewed Nvidia since many games either need it or run poorly without it. Gamers seem to tolerate an otherwise nearly unusable computer for Nvidia graphics acceleration where most users won't.
- jchw 3y ago
  Steam merely confirms what I already knew as a long-term Linux user: when it comes to discrete GPUs, NVIDIA has long been the biggest player. This isn't just Linux-specific either, NVIDIA commands a large portion of the GPU market period. Forgetting gamers, NVIDIA has the most robust options for hardware acceleration in many cases, especially for AI use cases like PyTorch, and a lot of productivity tools like Blender. ROCm and HAP exist, but AMD has often struggled to gain widespread support. If there's any strong evidence that NVIDIA still isn't winning in Linux desktop marketshare, I'd certainly be interested to hear it, and it would be news to me. I can imagine Intel technically has a lot of marketshare due to laptops, but then again, Intel and NVIDIA users are hardly mutually exclusive on laptops, either.
  - i2cmaster 3y ago
    I highly doubt the majority of Linux users have Steam installed, especially the kinds that don't tolerate Nvidia's drivers.
    - jchw 3y ago
      I don't really believe the majority of desktop Linux users have Steam installed. I do believe that the majority of Linux users historically (at least leading into the 2010s) used NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, for a multitude of reasons. Even today where AMD and Intel GPUs are clearly the better option for stability, that doesn't mean they're the best option for doing work with. If anything, gaming on AMD is pretty comparable today, in part thanks to Valve. Productivity on AMD is where things are not in good shape. I wish it weren't so, but compare the CUDA and OpenCL/ROCm ecosystems and it's pretty obvious. Most recently, when AMD released some pretty enticing GPU options into the market, ROCm users were surprised to find that their cards either were entirely unsupported, or support had not yet been stabilized. That's just not how things work with CUDA. I'd pay for things to get better here. I desperately hope that Vulkan as an option for compute can mature and compete with CUDA, but I also think that to do so, quite an ecosystem will need to be built up around it, even if the API and drivers prove sufficient to work as a solid runtime.