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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Wayland is literally never going to be ready unless it’s forced to be. How long has Nvidia promised to support it now, and still unless you’re using Nouveau it’s basically not usable on Nvidia cards.

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That isn’t waylands fault, it’s the closed source third parties

That was the same argument gnome 3 used when it wasn't working in my Nvidia GPU: the driver is buggy, not our fault.

This is very hard to explain to your users, because there's nothing they can do.

So yes, it really doesn't matter too much why if the software doesn't work. I don't mind X until Wayland is ready for all.

That's been the argument for every Linux problem for at least as long as I've been using Linux. WiFi drivers used to suck. To the point that you had to be careful which WiFi card (yes, card) you bought, because only a couple of models worked on Linux at all. This situation took an extremely long time to get better. The same thing happened (and is still happening) with graphics cards. But at least most of them sort of work, instead of outright failing.

As long as enough consumers don't actively demand decent Linux (or BSD, whatever) support, it will never come. I'd suggest voting with your wallets, but with the laptop market being the steaming pile of shit that it is, that's virtually impossible.

The year of the Linux desktop...just like fusion power, is always just around the corner.

Sometimes manufacturers lie to us, though. Like the Thinkpad x1 Carbon was supposed to be "linux-ready," and then it ships with sleep functionality broken for a couple months until they managed to get a BIOS fix through.

I tried to vote with my wallet, but this is what Linux is like /shrug

It's actually easy to explain - ditch Nvidia, they aren't supporting Linux properly. Pretty clear message, and users either get it and ditch it, and if not, nothing you could do to help them. It's totally Nvidia's fault.

My Nvidia GPU was fine until gnome 3 happened. See, is not my fault. It had good drivers and decent support.

Now I use only Intel because... well, it works. But I don't bother with 3D gaming, of course.

My point is that you can blame the manufacturers because their support is broken, but you can't blame the users because they will use something else (I know I did: XFCE works great).

EDIT: Gnome shell was initially released in 2011. This may or may not have changed, for better or worse. I moved on.

Nvidia is far from fine. To understand their attitude, read this comment from one of the leading Nouveau developers: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

I agree, you can't blame users for it, but you can totally tell them to try to switch. DE and Wayland compositor developers can't spend resources cleaning up the mess that Nvidia created by refusing to upstream their driver and preventing Nouveau from working properly as well.

Users don't care whose fault it is. Once you start laying blame you've already lost.

Users not knowing or caring about these details is precisely why users should be kept away from the management of these projects. The details do matter, even if the user lacks the context or domain specific knowledge to make heads from tails of those details.

Drivers are often bad and nvidia's especially so but at this point if it's been years and you can't get a desktop window manager compositing on top of a GPU stack the problem seems increasingly likely to be you and not them. Blitting quads is not THAT hard. We've got vendors like Mozilla out there rasterizing entire webpages on NVIDIA (and AMD now, I think?) GPUs but Wayland can't reliably composite window bitmaps for some reason?

For whom does that actually matter, though?

Wayland developers, who are not GPU reverse-engineers.

Sure, but they already know this. You or anyone else on Hacker News is not clarifying this for them.

Meanwhile, telling users who to blame does nothing for them. They don’t care. To them, the best entity to blame is the distribution, that’s pretty much their job.

But while blame doesn’t fix problems, neither does doing nothing. What I’m suggesting is, the move to Wayland needs to be pushed harder if anything is going to be fixed. Nvidia can’t hold it back, that’s not sustainable.

But again, users can’t do that. Distributions can do that. Distributions can tell people, sorry, we can’t support Nvidia, contact Nvidia, they already promised to work towards this, and what they produced is incomplete. If they continue to support X11, there's no urgency to fixing the issues with Wayland.

This isn’t really about blame though, it’s about responsibility. Somebody has to fix the problem. Open source projects like Nouveau can help, but Nvidia has blocked progress by requiring signed blobs and continually not providing access to important information (like technical bits for reclocking.) I think that is pretty much reason enough to suggest Nvidia should be shouldering the pressure and responsibility to deliver a good Linux experience, and we should absolutely hold them to it, until or if they stop blocking open source efforts on purpose.

Establishing blame would tell you who’s fault it is that something is broken. Answer is nearly useless imo. Only thing that matters is how do we fix it and possibly what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Saying Nvidia should fix it is different from worrying about who is to blame; if you frame it that way, they could fire back about how kernel licensing restrictions make their life harder, and nobody cares about that issue either.

> "Meanwhile, telling users who to blame does nothing for them. They don’t care. To them, the best entity to blame is the distribution, that’s pretty much their job."

I think there is value in telling users to vent their frustration in a productive direction; namely at Nvidia who has the power to change the situation, rather than at Wayland developers who are likely just as frustrated. I think we both generally agree on that.

Yeah, Nvidia is the right entity to bother no doubt, I just have a different idea of the tone and attitude. The approach I’ve seen before feels more like guiding an angry mob. I’m not really an expert but I feel what we need is firm decisions (drop support, it’s time) and clear messaging (vote with your wallet, and tell Nvidia you need this.)

Apple dropped support for Nvidia graphics. Linux will be next at this rate.

Still, I want to shy away from blame. Blame is complicated, can be deflected, and often leads to hatred. I prefer to say, Nvidia is responsible, nobody else can fix this.

NVidia sales hardly suffer from it.

In what regards Linux, the only customers that matter to NVidia are CUDA users (don't care about their UI on cloud instances) and Hollywood studios (have their own in-house distributions).

Is that still the case? I'm running FC29 with the nVidia closed-source drivers and I haven't had issues. (I have had issues on a laptop with switchable graphics, though, and Nouveau was the solution there.)

Is this new? Last time I tried, Nvidia on Wayland had performance issues and did not support Optimus at all (Edit: after rereading what you said I am guessing that is still an issue.)

If it is working though I retract what I said, though it’s absurd how long it took to happen.

Even without wayland, in recent Fedora releases (I forget if it started with 28 or 29), I've found optimus switchable graphics to be impossible or at least impractical to configure. What's become easier is having the entire X display use the nvidia gpu, with the intel gpu transparently slaved to relay pixels to its connected laptop display.

But, it does return the annoying, periodic driver breakage, where a dnf update replaces the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia RPMs and suddenly the userspace is incompatible with the still-running kernel module's slightly older API, so new processes cannot use opengl until I reboot. This was one benefit of optimus via the optirun infrastructure. The main desktop was on the intel gpu and I could actually unload and upgrade the nvidia module if desired, without forcing a disruptive reboot.

Do you have any documentation, or even random notes, on how you set that up? I have an optimus laptop and couldn't make the proprietary drivers work ( tried both rpmfusion and negativo17). I m happily using nouveau for now but at some point I ll need to use CUDA again.

I have an older Thinkpad T440p with Geforce GT 730M running Fedora 29. I use the MATE desktop rather than GNOME.

I just installed the akmod-nvidia packages from rpmfusion which also pulls in xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda. Search for "PRIME" discussions in the README.txt under /usr/share/doc/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia. I cannot be sure every bit of my config is still necessary, as I left it alone once I got it working.

First, I have /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/nvidia-prime.conf with a small amount of config:

  Section "Module"
    Load "modesetting"
  EndSection

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "nvidia"
    Driver "nvidia"
    Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
  EndSection

Then, I created a custom script in /etc/lightdm/display_setup.sh:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  if rpm -q xorg-x11-drv-nvidia \
     && lsmod | grep '^nvidia' '
  then
    xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0
    xrandr --auto
    xrandr --output eDP-1-1 --set "PRIME Synchronization" 1
  fi

And in my /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf I added one line to call that script:

  ...
  [Seat:*]
  ...
  display-setup-script=/etc/lightdm/display_setup.sh

To be honest, my old GPU is too slow and with too small RAM to be worthwhile for OpenCL. I find it more practical to just use the Intel OpenCL runtime for multi-core CPUs on this old quad-core laptop or on newer workstations. I do get some use out of xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda on a Titan X desktop GPU though.

Thanks a lot!

I 've already created a thread about my problems in askfedora, made a last post there now linking to your post here in case they help somebody else. https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/black-screen-after-installin...

I 'll try your notes when I have enough free time to re-install if things go bad.

Why is your standard for a Linux desktop renderer whether a pretty Linux-hostile company's niche laptop energy saving hybrid GPU driver works well on it?

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