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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

> So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. With respect, my answer is no.

I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Yes, they'll have to write several thousand more lines of code, but if you're going to make a desktop environment in 2019, you're going to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have. It would be great if Nvidia had better Linux support! But they don't and washing your desktop platform's hands of the issue just makes the whole project DOA.

Are there any competitors to Wayland that don't take a hard-line stance against supporting the most popular and most powerful graphics cards in the world?

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Not even Apple, apparently: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management...

As someone who hasn't bought a GPU in several years, but might be in the market for one soon, I have to wonder: what the heck is going on with Nvidia?

I remember back in the day, on Linux, they were the graphics card to get if you wanted the highest performance, and could get their proprietary drivers working reliably (I never could). But now they seem to be alienating even closed-source partners.

As someone who thinks any GPU made in the past 5 years is more than good enough, avoiding the Nvidia driver situation (on every platform) would be worth the slight performance loss of getting literally any other card.

Nouveau works. Use it instead.

Also: it's possible to have a definition of success which excludes users of the proprietary driver. We don't have the same value system.

>the [...] most powerful graphics cards in the world?

Citation needed? And the highest of the high end graphics cards are excessive vanity most of the time, you don't need the tip-top to play any modern game at any settings you want.

Working and actually taking advantage of the performance I paid for are two different things.

This is a very dismissive attitude that embodies the problem with Wayland. Millions of gamers absolutely do need that acceleration they paid for, it's not "vanity".

> We don't have the same value system.

I just want a usable Linux desktop that leverages the hardware in my machine. The "values" here seem to be: we acknowledge the extra work required to support mainstream graphics cards, we just don't want to do it and it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it.

No, they don't. I'm a gamer myself (infrequently these days to be fair). You can have excellent performance with maxed out settings on big ol' 4K displays... on last year's GPUs, which work fine with Nouveau.

>it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it.

Yes, I'm soooo sorry that I don't want to do free work to help you prop up a company that lives to make me suffer as a developer...

I'm clearly exagerrating here but I hope the point is made. Like the article says, just keep using X, I don't care.

Again, you are completely ignoring people's use cases with smug glib replies. I assure you Nouveau absolutely does not work fine with newer cards, and never will, because those cards are locked into a low power state in Nouveau. (Due to nvidia firmware fuckery). We are talking about 10% (if that) of the performance levels VS the closed drivers. This absolutely, unquestionably, makes a huge amount of intensive 3d software (not only games) completely unusable.

If you are wondering why people are pissed about wayland, its precisely awful attitudes like this that sweep aside their real concerns and use cases with broken ideas that don't work, have never worked, and likely never will work.

Don't expect people to be on board when you so blatantly don't care about their needs.

I don't care about their needs. I've made this clear many, many times. But I do care about the needs of many thousands of users who choose not to reward abusive companies by buying their products.

You can keep using X with Nvidia. It's not my problem.

So perhaps you should complain less when people are hostile about wayland, because this is one of many aspects of how completely inadequate it is as an X11 replacement.

It doesn't make sense to be hostile about Wayland just because you can't use it due to your poor choice of graphics hardware. X still works. Just use that! No one needs to get upset.

wayland's plan is to superseded then depreciate X11 (ie X11 stops development). Again, you understand this and are just being glib and offering solutions _you know to be broken_ (because getting rid of x11 is the entire goal of wayland to begin with).

There is a ton of dishonesty underlying your arguments, and you sure as hell don't do any favors for Wayland, or how people perceive it when you use dishonest bs like this.

It is then up to Nvidia to find a way forward, once X11 development stops. After all, they monopolized driver development for their GPUs, so when something breaks, they get to keep all the pieces.

This is the real answer. The Wayland devs are the X11 devs. When the music stops and X11 development ends Nvidia is going to have to make the choice between supporting Wayland or dropping support for graphics on Linux.

Maybe your misconception TFA is debunking is that wayland centers your use case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, cool, what kind of games are you getting playable performance (60+ fps?) with? I was under the impression that nouveau was basically unsuitable for modern/AAA videogames, maybe I need to reevaluate!

Well, like I said, I don't game much. But recently I've been playing a little bit of DOOM at 4K on Vulkan via Xwayland using AMDGPU and have had no issues. I also had success in playing Final Fantasy X with PCSX-2 recently (at 1080p I think, but I'm pretty sure I had room to spare in terms of performance anyway). I also play osu! fairly often, but that's not exactly graphically intensive.

> No, they don't. I'm a gamer myself (infrequently these days to be fair). You can have excellent performance with maxed out settings on big ol' 4K displays... on last year's GPUs, which work fine with Nouveau.

I don't have a horse in this race because I still do all my gaming on Windows (literally the only reason I still have a win10 license), but I think this is generally true. Up until last year I was playing current titles on a GTX-660Ti on high settings (not ultra) and was getting very reasonable performance. I now have a 1070 and a 4k monitor and it can play all the titles I own on ultra settings in 1440p @ 60 hz. It can't really push ultra in 4k @ that refresh rate, but I think people who need those settings are a pretty small minority at this point. It's important to remember that the market for desktop computer games has taken a back seat to the console market for a long time. Many, if not most, current AAA titles are developed for consoles first, and consoles are all running hardware that is a couple of years old at this point. Anyway, keep up the good work!

Your work on sway and wlroots is phenomenal, but I feel like there is quite a gap here in terms of why people are concerned about Nvidia support.

Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported.

While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics.

It seems fairly clear with with MacOS focusing less and less on high end machines, there is a gap for high end unix workstations and hopefully desktop Linux can fill that gap, but right now that likely means Nvidia support... I think the best answer is just to buy amd and market forces will get Nvidia to change, but that still doesn't mean everyone can just go that path right now to get their day job done.

>Yes, Nvidia are not great when it comes to OSS, but like it or not, for doing real work in ML, scientific computing, or video and photo editing, Nvidia with CUDA is simply a much better experience and much more broadly supported.

Fine. If you do these things, stay on X.

>While I don't think it should be the job of wlroots/sway to fix Nvidia's less than ideal driver chain, I think it is important to remember that a lot of people get a lot of productive work done on with Nvidia cards and would love to get rid of some of the pain of X while still being able to use their high end GPUs for both work and graphics.

I honestly just don't care. They should boycott Nvidia and find something else to do with their time if they really want better support from Wayland. I'm not going to bend over for Nvidia. Ever.

Nor do I think you should, my only point is to say that people's FUD about Wayland often has roots in FOMO about not being able to use the new and shiny for their workflow and no clear path to when/how that will be fixed, regardless of whose "job" it is to fix the problem.

The people who demand change are wrong too, I am super happy people like you are doing what you do, otherwise this OSS thing really would never work.

But to be clear, while I think your stance is completely reasonable and justified, it is just a hard pill for some people to swallow. That doesn't mean that those who are jerks about it are justified, but it also doesn't mean that those who raise concerns, that those concerns aren't warranted.

Where is the current Nouveau work for supporting these features on nvidia cards? I feel like that's where the focus should be (where you should contribute time, money convince your company to sponsor, etc.) to get the features generally available in Linux without the proprietary drivers.

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

> Nouveau works. Use it instead. No it doesn't. I have dual GPU laptop Intel UHD 620/Geforce MX 150 and until I blacklist nouveau the laptop is unusable. It either won't boot or when it boots will freeze the system every 30 sec for 10 sec making it unusable.

So use the Intel GPU instead.

Sure, that's what I am doing anyway. Just wanted to point out that nouveau is not really great option.

> Nouveau works. Use it instead.

It works beautifully with sway. Less so with KWin for me at least, although apparently NVIDIA are doing some work to fix that.

Reclocking support on recent GPUs is also a problem for anything that wants full performance - they really need to sort that out. I get that this is hard to do.

This whole situation is just really annoying and it must be immensely frustrating to be on the end of a lot of the complaints especially when the position of the sway developers not wanting to essentially write it twice just for NVIDIA support is totally reasonable.

Nvidia makes many millions each year from CUDA on Linux. If they want to keep biting the hand that feeds them, there are lots of places that would be happy to embrace ROCm once it becomes viable.

Much more likely is that these shops just never install Wayland. I think people are underestimating the switching costs for moving from X to Wayland especially when that move requires buying brand new video cards.

I think the average user is going to "switch" to wayland by being handed a new laptop that happens to run a recent-enough gnome that uses wayland as the default.

> to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have

FYI: most people have Intel GPUs. More than both AMD and Nvidia combined (Somewhere around 70%, AMD around 13% and Nvidia around 17%). Intel and AMD are supported, ergo for most people it works just fine. It could work with Nvidia too, if Nvidia were cooperative.

> I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia.

Well, they should get their act together and work with the rest of the community instead. In KDE, people working in KWin said that they will not support NVIDIA for Wayland, unless NVIDIA itself steps in, proposes a change, gets it approved, and maintains it.

That's what they ended up doing so far, although the change hasn't been merged anywhere yet AFAIK.

The GNOME project supports nvidia in its current beta

Awesome! Does it use Nouveau or the Nvidia binary drivers? There's a big difference in performance between the two.

It works with nvidias driver, recently nvidia began working on some patches for kde as well I belive.

Yep, the aforementioned patch: https://phabricator.kde.org/D18570

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