How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?
The short of it is, every card has 2d support. There are very few lacking 3d acceleration. Newer cards have flimsy video acceleration. Power management is severely lacking across the board. Specific advanced features are hit or miss. Performance is still behind the proprietary driver in every case I've seen; but for cards from the 200 to 700 series, it's a smaller drop-off than newer cards.
I'd recommend giving it a try and see how it works in your specific use case. I've personally never found a case where nouveau works well enough to drop the Nvidia driver, but I'm usually on the latest or next to latest gen.
For newer cards, nouveau can be a quite sad experience due to nvidia not only making a mess of their own driver, but actively handicapping development of nouveau.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) here is some interesting info on the state, with a lot of references
nvidia are a bunch of dicks who have no real reason to keep their specifications closed other than to (speculating) hide things they don't want you to see. patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... intel/amd are where people should invest, especially people who are using alternate (non-windows) platforms, since nvidia will never open their sources, and amd/intel will never improve the way you want if you don't invest in their future!
`if (game == "Fifa2016") use_nvidia_custom_shaders() ...`
So games don't work quite fast and the game companies ask nVidia to fix it in their drivers, which might do stuff such as adding custom shaders to get that good fps. That's why many major games require you to update to the latest nVidia drivers before running.
I don't know how much AMD does this, their open source support is excellent nowadays.
That's not how it works. Even if you patent something others can copy it (and I don't mean just the source, but the idea, algorithm, implementation) and use it in their products and then you're left with the work of completely reverse engineer them, figure it all out, then sue them, etc.
So you can either do that or just never open your source. Who can blame them?
BTW, I believe the reason it's not supported isn't because OS developers don't understand how it works - it's because Nvidia has never released the private keys associated with power management on the GPU. So the only thing Nvidia's got to do is to provide these keys to the open-source community. So it is a DRM issue.
Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?
There is also a difference between data exchange (codecs, doc*, etc) and drivers. Intransigence by the kernel community regarding closed source code has resulted in Good Things in the driver space.
It means that people writing wayland compositors have to write a EGL stream version because of a purely one-sided nvidia decision.
EGL Stream support in Mutter (gnome) is supported a bit by Nvidia but that's it.
Between spending time on improving a compositor and the window managers making use of it or spending time to support non standard driver implementation because of one-sided decision from nvidia, it seems to me that the first choice is a smarter one.
Just look at the ifdef in the Python source code to make it cross plateform, it's insane.
But it's what's makes it useful.
You can have purity. But you won't have many users, because on the scale "Stallman <=> My dad", they will all be on the far left.
Nothing wrong with that. But it won't be a big number.
if (nvidia) {
// thousands of lines of code
} else {
// thousands of lines of code
}
It's only nVidia that would be excluded, due to them acting like children and trying to push proprietary things as the only GPU vendor.
That works great with sway
B: continue using i3 with X
can you, with any app that takes screenshots ? e.g. with SimpleScreenRecorder or flameshot ?
Uh... how about I just not use your software? I'm not going to replace a couple thousand dollars in GPUs, or even buy a new specific GPU just so I can use your software.
Also, what the hell are you using a couple thousand dollars in consumer nVidia GPUs for on a Linux system?
What you're suggesting may be fine for casual desktop users at home, but in many cases it's simply not possible.
However, it's up to nvidia to fix. No one intends to support their lazy eglstream suggestion for countless reasons, and only gnome is left, which IIRC intends to drop it too.
ML is a good example of why not putting up with them will work. They need that customer base. If all support is dropped, they'll need to act.
So first Wayland came for the networked UIs because "X forwarding is shit" then they wayland users came for NVIDIA because "we don't like how they do it". I can see myself booting into a Windows 10 desktop in five to ten years because pretty much everything I relied on on Linux has been killed off by then, oh whait that is GNOME 10, it just looks and acts just as user hostile as Windows.
Excuse me while I seat myself into a corner with my trusty X window based software that at least does what I need it to do half the time.
> Excuse me while I seat myself into a corner with my trusty X window based software that at least does what I need it to do half the time.
Enjoy your root escalation exploits and complete lack of any usable security model, then. Oh, and soon, complete obsolescence. I'll enjoy my out-of-the box wayland setup.
Oh, and yes, X forwarding is total utter crap. Wayland will have remote capabilities, but X forwarding was never a good idea. It was okay 20 years ago, but it doesn't make sense at any level today.
Refusing to support nvidia accomplishes that their shitty approach will die. They will then have to pick between either dropping linux support (which they don't want exactly due to ML and stuff), or having to do shit right.
IIRC, gnome is also dropping eglstream support (nvidia crap), leaving nothing supporting it.