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Comment by loufe | Hacker News Reader

I wish it was just the game makers needing to build for another platform which is the problem. Unfortunately a large problem is also graphics drivers. NVidia and AMD don't do much to help the open source community / linux with the development of their drivers, meaning they don't harness the power of the cards often times by significant margins comparing with Windows. There are other technical hiccups which make a difference as well.

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AMD has excellent open source support. They embraced the Linux community a few years ago, and we now have a high quality AMD driver mainlined in the Linux kernel. Games run very well on AMD/Linux, including Steam/Proton.

It's NVIDIA that is completely Linux/OSS hostile, and still follows the broken proprietary driver approach they have been doing for years. On top of that they actively ignore the agreed community standards and build proprietary/inferior APIs because it's less work for them (like EGL).

I'm completely baffled by NVIDIA's approach to be honest. Especially with scientific workloads on Linux. It seems like investing in a small team to build high quality mainlined Linux drivers would be a net win for them for little cost.

Nvidia has always had super high quality Linux drivers. It’s their lack of desire to open source pieces of them to make them work better with desktop Linux that is the issue. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of Nvidia GPUs used on Linux don’t have a screen connected to them, so supporting wayland isn’t really a priority.

It's really hard to consider these drivers "high quality" if they don't even work with Wayland properly.

Why would Nvidia care about supporting Wayland at this point in time? Steam itself doesn't even work properly with Wayland. 9 of 10 people are going to be using X right now and within the near future.

Wayland offers performance and security improvements over X, and is seeing rapid adoption on GNOME-based distributions. Since both Intel and AMD properly support Wayland through the GBM buffer API, Nvidia is going to be left behind unless they start improving or replacing their EGLStreams API instead of leaving it stagnant.

> Nvidia has always had super high quality Linux drivers.

I assume you've never used an optimus enabled laptop on Linux? Or dealt with the horribly fragmented driver versions? Or the fact the binary blob installer likes to dump random files all over your system? Or DRM/KMS issues in the past? The wayland incompatibilities and refusal to support the GBM kernel API is just the latest in a long history of terrible Linux support.

AMD just works out of the box - high quality and fast drivers with zero config required.

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