Do you use Nvidia products on Linux? Reading "love" and "Nvidia" in the same sentence feels a little bit odd because the general sentiment for Nvidia on the Linux community is "don't touch it with a 10 foot pole". If I remember correctly Torvalds himself named it the worst hardware company they had to deal with.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Besides games, using CUDA on Linux has been the de facto OS for anything serious for almost as long as CUDA has existed. What exactly is the problem with it?
I think this sentiment exists solely among people that don’t actually own any NVIDIA hardware. I‘ve never had any problems with their drivers, any crashes in video games can be usually be attributed to be at least in part the Games fault. In contrast to Windows Linux has abysmal support for restarting crashed video drivers.
Linus Torvalds's kernel developer point of view might be very different from the majority of users'. For the end users, they just need to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers and everything just works.
For a long time, Nvidia was the best option for 3D graphics on Linux. ATI/AMD had terrible drivers (fglrx/Catalyst), Intel had abysmal performance.
The proprietary drivers are pretty nice and performant and have been for a long time. The same can’t be said about Intel (they don’t produce comparable hardware) or AMD (until recently their drivers were garbage, at the moment their best graphics card is worse than the best NVIDIA one)
With nvidia-docker (multi-year effort at this point) and AMIs, esp. the era of ML, this is a non-issue for 80% of our users. The other 20% struggle even without the GPUs. ML is a thing and GPUs run it, so the community has come together here.
Linux laptops remain a mess in general tho, which is annoying for non-cloud dev =/
