On the one hand, trying to work with a company as intractable and anti-OSS as Nvidia must be incredibly frustrating and I sympathize. Nouveau is too slow and broken to be usable, and that's also NV's fault. On the other, I'm never going to choose Wayland over Nvidia (i.e. throw out all my GPUs and buy slower ones), and it obviously can't be a default in any major distros while this is still the case. So long as it's not a default, it won't have the support or pressure needed to fix its many smaller problems.
Unfortunately, Wayland is dead in the water until it can run on Nvidia machines, and no amount of blog posts will change that.
Yet again, wayland is the protocol. Wlroots based wayland compositors doesn’t support the nvidia created API, but gnome and as far as I know plasma on wayland both do so. So your statement is simply false that wayland can’t run on nvidia (proprietary. The open source version works everywhere).
if people on HN don't know or care on something like this (I didn't, and I don't), then good luck telling less HN-y people about wayland being the protocol and not the implementation.
I'm annoyed at myself for this very comment, but somehow, somebody (many people), somewhere messed up the messaging around these things.
The messaging needs to not say "wayland replaces X11", but instead "GNOME or KDE replace X11" & if someone wants to use a different compositor it's up to that compositor whether they want to match X11 features or not (& then the rest of the software ecosystem to implement support for that compositor's features)
Then it becomes a question of whether GNOME/KDE have feature parity between X11 & wayland. Then other compositors can go about implementing the interfaces they've setup to be GNOME or KDE compatible
> Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase.
Can't say he isn't straightforward. If you bought your computer without thinking about running Linux on it, or if you're looking to install Linux on an employer-supplied Windows laptop, there's an excellent chance you're a shitty consumer that he doesn't want using his software.
Yeah I did think about it, which boiled down to "NVIDIA has working up-to-date Linux drivers" -- AMD used to be way worse and also there also has been a shortage of AMD-based workstation-class laptops on the market.
What I haven't considered is whether NVIDIA's Linux drivers might be implementing a particular graphics stack interface differently so that implementing Wayland on top of it becomes a PITA for some developers (not that GNOME and KDE didn't compromise to implement it anyways for users' sake). That does not make me a "shitty consumer", there is no way even a cautious consumer can take things like "GBM vs EGLStreams" fully into account every time.
Wow, so he writes an article about people being assholes about him not writing free extra stuff, and this other article saying literally “nvidia- fuck you” (and its “shitty consumers”) for not writing this other free extra stuff. He says that’s treating Linux users like shit, when a massive part of nvidia’s business is supporting Linux (GPGPU stuff), which works fantastically.
Reading OP, I figured it was righteously angry. Reading your article, I’m now figuring he’s just angry and abrasive. The OP article reads hypocritical after reading yours.
>so he writes an article about people being assholes about him not writing free extra stuff
I did write that extra free stuff, and I'm arguing that some people are being assholes because they perpetuate the lie that I didn't do the free work, and because feature "foo" doesn't work, project bar must be bad. But feature "foo" does work, and using that falsehood to say project "bar" is bad is a dick move. This is the "horseshit" that's pissing me off.
The Nvidia issue is different: Nvidia goes out of their way to prevent their hardware from being used for this purpose. For example, they use signed firmwares that we simply cannot use for implementing the features we need, relying on cryptography to lock us out of their platform unless we use their driver. Then that driver doesn't support what we need. Nvidia deliberately prevents us from putting in the effort. They have created an artificial monpoloy on the required labor, then refuse to do it.
You and I are reading the criticism differently. There’s genuine assholery, 100%. You’re entirely right that those people just make everything worse, and I’m sorry let you have to deal with them.
The other side of things is what I see differently. When folks are saying wayland isn’t ready, or even that it sucks, I mostly see them as referring to the ecosystem, not wayland itself. It’s an unfortunate quirk of language. Because foo doesn’t work, the bar ecosystem is currently bad.
On the nvidia side, I’m not going to engage further with you on that because you called me a shitty consumer and that pisses me off. Fuck me, you don’t want me in your userbase anyways, right?
Good luck, and I wish you users with the same understanding and respect for your choices. I hope nobody calls you a shitty developer because you made choices they don’t appreciate.
> when a massive part of nvidia’s business is supporting Linux (GPGPU stuff)
I've spent the last few months doing GPGPU stuff on Nvidia Jetson devices and my experience has been the complete opposite. I've rarely seen something with such bad support and documentation.
I'd love to hear more. I've only used the datacenter and flagship consumer GPUs, which work great. I hadn't heard of Jetson, but looking it up, it's a bummer to hear that something that looks that cool for hobbies doesn't hold up.
Well, don't get me wrong. I do like my Jetson Nano. For a hobbyist who likes to tinker with machine learning in their spare time it's definitely a product cool and there are quite a few repositories on Github[0, 1] with sample code.
Unfortunately… I'm not a hobbyist, I'm not tinkering and the aforementioned repositories are… about it. There is little documentation about
- how to build a custom OS image (necessary if you're thinking about using Jetson as part of your own product, i.e. a large-scale deployment). Ideally, I would like to do that as part of a CI/CD workflow. What proprietary drivers and libraries do I need to install? Nvidia basically says, here's our custom Ubuntu image with the usual GUI, complete driver stack and everything – take it or leave it. Unfortunately, the GUI alone is eating up a lot of the precious CPU and GPU resources, so using their OS image in production is no option for me.
- how deployment works on production modules (as opposed to the non-production module in the Developer Kit)
- what production modules are available in the first place ("Please refer to our partners")
- what wifi dongles are compatible (the most recent Jetson Nano comes w/o wifi)
- how to convert your custom models to TensorRT, what you need to pay attention to etc. (The official docs basically say: Have a look at the following nondescript sample code. Good luck.)
- how do I automize testing of TensorRT models & code? Why isn't there a compatibility layer which allows executing my models on non-Jetson devices / on a CPU (obviously at lower performance, but I don't mind).
- … (I'm sure I'm forgetting many other things that I've struggled with over the past months)
Anyway. It's not that this information isn't out there somewhere in some blog post, some obscure Github repo or some thread on the Nvidia forums[2]. (Though I have yet to find a wifi dongle that works reliably…) But it usually takes you days or weeks to find it. From a product which is supposed to be industry-grade I would have expected more.
Appreciate the info! I'll have to look into that. As someone who runs Computer Graphics software GPU perf is important to me. I'll be curious to look into how Nouveau behaves there
As an aside, i hate GPUs on Linux. I'm running Blender and am in the market for a new PC build. The GPU is a huge source of confusion, due to Linux.
I see so many conflicting stories about how well AMD GPUs behave and perform on Linux. Some new, many old. Some even as extreme as "I bought a new AMD GPU and there are no drivers for it yet". Furthermore for Blender specifically AMD seems to get the short stick in performance.
Really leaves me confused as to what to buy. Just venting.
Amd should work but you will most likely require the proprietary drivers which implement openCL. Amd has a second project called rocm which is meant to work with blender and be open source but it has shocking support for their products (no support for the 5700xt)
How well does Nouveau work on Wayland? On X11 it's a complete disaster compared to the proprietary drivers. Framerate drops when just moving windows around or scrolling in my editor, screen tearing, fans blasting when playing videos or just randomly.
Drew wrote a blog entirely devoted to the Nvidia issue: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html