Exactly. Nvidia's position is so incredibly strong in AI and these customers clearly do not care whatsoever about spats like this and/or whether or not the driv

Exactly. Nvidia's position is so incredibly strong in AI and these customers clearly do not care whatsoever about spats like this and/or whether or not the driver is closed source/binary/whatever. If they did AMD/ROCm would have more than low single digit market share in AI. Nvidia obviously has the resources and ability to make a Debian/Ubuntu derivative (or whatever) that can offer increased usability, performance, etc with their hardware. Nvidia may even save effort and cost internally by primarily focusing AI/CUDA driver development on their own distro as opposed to what I'm sure is currently a significant amount of patchwork, workarounds, etc for the bewildering array of variability currently present in the Linux ecosystem. These users/customers aren't using a given Linux distro out of idealistic passion/preference for the distro like many users here - they just want to do AI. They're going to use the best tools available to achieve that goal. Needless to say these massive thousands of Nvidia GPU deployments are highly orchestrated and if an Nvidia distro can offer even 1% improvement on the usability, performance, etc with their hardware these customers are going to deploy an Nvidia distro immediately. These customers are also likely effectively supporting a distro variant already and they would absolutely rather let Nvidia take on as much of this effort as possible. I'd venture to guess many Nvidia customers have actually been asking Nvidia for it - Nvidia may already effectively be doing it for them. Lambda Labs (for example) already does this - shipping and supporting an Ubuntu derivative that does whatever you want with AI within seconds of booting their hardware. Even Oracle already does this and the recent issues with RHEL/Cent are yet another reason this makes sense to Nvidia. Nvidia also already does this with their Jetson line of hardware. You're absolutely correct that it is the desktop users who will get shafted by this. I've been a Linux desktop user since 1997. I love Linux. However, for something like this not even the might and influence of Linux/Linus/etc will "win" going up against Nvidia on this.