However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.
If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.
Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces directly with hardware to draw them on the screen.
Absent any other technical problems, it's hard not to conclude that this is just an attempt to use politics to cover up one of Wayland's poor design choices.
This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution.
NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA.
Nothing in wayland is incompatible with NVIDIA's approach. GNOME supports it, and KDE recently gained support. However, the NVIDIA approach exists for only one reason: Because NVIDIA does not want to play along with the open source world, and doing the least amount of work to their proprietary driver.
Unless NVIDIA turns their ship around, supporting NVIDIA is harmful to our community. Although, if they'd just keep up with our standardized APIs, maybe we could somehow accept their ridiculous proprietary drivers which has no place in this decade.
If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? You could write your compositor that talks to the hardware using your "sane" interface, and someone else could write a compositor that uses the NVIDIA interface, and users could pick the compositor that works for them and use it with any window manager they choose.
It's only because of Wayland's design that "GPU manufacturer creates nonstandard interface to their driver" is some giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community.
That's not how I think of it. By analogy, consider POSIX. Every major operating system supports the POSIX interface--all of them, except one that is. But no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community."
Essentially, you have to pick a point somewhere in the stack where you define the common interface between the different hardware vendors. The problem is that one hardware vendor, because it's the 800 lb. gorilla who loves throwing its weight around, decided to not implement the common interface, hoping that its weight will force everyone else to adapt. Wayland is unfortunate enough to be in a position where it relies on that common interface being supported, but this isn't the only place that NVidia has decided to try to scuttle cross-vendor compatibility (GPGPU computing is a very notorious case).
we did do that, and they were, but for the most part, for the moment (at least) we've won - so it's no longer on the tip of our tongue
"POSIX Has Become Outdated"
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/issues/login_fall1...
So no, Windows isn't the only one that doesn't care.
Hardware definitely needs drivers, but these days the Linux community has settled on the model that all drivers should live in the Linux kernel, where they can share common code like "talking to the PCI bus" and security infrastructure. What you're proposing is that, instead of having one driver layer from "standard API" to "hardware interface", there should be multiple redundant driver layers, so that NVIDIA can implement whichever layer optimally balances their desire to support customers with their desire to hide their intellectual property.
That's not a crazy position (NVIDIA certainly holds it, and they're no small fry!) but telling Libre graphics-stack people "you need to make your architecture more complex and do extra work for free, to make this multi-billion-dollar company feel more comfortable" is always going to be a difficult proposition.
It does. It's called Wayland.
I suspect you might instead be thinking of a standard window manager interface to plug into a compositor, rather than the other way around.
The Wayland approach has been to just make it easier to write a compositor, instead of porting X's complexities and odd design choices.
However, nothing stops you from making a compositor with such an interface. It won't be part of Wayland, but it would be its own spec.
However, this suggestion would be a case of symptomatic treatment. The root cause of complexity is NVIDIA.
> It's only because of Wayland's design
This is not true. It just because Wayland is not X, and NVIDIA only has support for X.
Under X, every driver had its own integration, which was a pain to make, maintain and use.
For Wayland, the community got together to make a generic API that had nothing to do with Wayland, allowing applications (be it a wayland compositor or something else) to not have to think about what they're running on.
NVIDIA, however, is just trying to throw more duct-tape, taking us back to the X era.
You may ask "Why don't everyone just implement EGLStream?" - that is because EGLStream has no merit, and is just the implementation that would be easiest for NVIDIA to implement. Why would we make everything else worse, spending significant time and effort redesigning everything else, all to save NVIDIA a few bucks?
If they have actual concerns, we can solve it as a community, but considering that everyone invested significant time in this project, we are not going to throw it all away and pick a vastly inferior model just so that NVIDIA doesn't have to do anything. NVIDIA is just one GPU manufacturer out of many, and on Linux, a small one.
As for EGLStream problems: Performance and stability are the big ones. Ironically, EGLStream is bad for gaming, as we cannot do direct scanout with it (an optimization where full-screen content gets thrown directly to screen instead of going through compositing).
Is there a list of ranking anywhere?
I vaguely have an idea of probably Intel is first then AMD second.
However, they mostly refuse to play ball. They did seem to be preparing an alternative suggestion, but they seem to have dropped it entirely in favor of just dumping EGLStream patches on KDE and GNOME, hoping every one else will be forced to follow.
EGLStreams works by having children pass ownership of the surface they want to display to their parent for compositing. This invalidates said surface.
GBM is a coherent model. Handles are passed around to prevent the need for copying, but ownership isn’t transferred.
Nvidia’s driver is a black box, but I don’t think they can do things that way without some significant driver refactoring. Obviously that’s costly, so they’re trying to avoid doing it.
AMD took a gamble when they began their open source initiative. It’s starting to pay off now with stuff like Stadia and the Valve stuff. I feel like Nvidia is going to have to do an open driver eventually. I hope they’ve got at least something in the works that we don’t know about.
I’m not going to suggest replacing Nvidia cards if they’re working fine for what you do. Just look at AMD (or Intel next year) if you start hunting for your next card. Don’t fall into the brand loyalty pit.