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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

The author is kind of a jerk. He complains that users don't like wayland when he entirely and wholesale rejects anyone who wants to use an nvidia graphics card.

Maintainers with attitudes like this are why we can't have nice things:

https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Sadly, the OSS driver doesn't support the 4k monitors I use for work well enough to actually use day to day. So my option is to use an "evil" but very stable driver and no wayland to do my job and get paid, or not.

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Drew Devault is an interesting character. I find some of the ways he chooses to express himself to be pretty poor most of the time. That said, Drew does come from a place of genuine caring, erratic, divisive, and brusque opinions aside. You just have to learn to filter out most of the useless anger and frustration he tends to speak with.

All that to say, nvidia doesn't really do the work to play ball in Linux with Wayland. There is no way to improve these drivers, you can only hope Nouveau can solve your woes.

> You just have to learn to filter out most of the useless anger and frustration he tends to speak with.

Or, here is a wild idea, we stop looking for some "wisdom" in what people who often express themselves this poorly write. Most of what this "thought leader" writes that I happened to read have the same punchline, and it got old pretty fast.

Sometimes, stuff is just garbage. You don't have to look through 99% of the garbage to find some 1% that is supposedly not as garbage.

I definitely understand that it's difficult to listen to people like this. If you feel that way, my recommendation is don't engage with his content. I certainly don't recommend Drew Devault's writing or projects to anyone precisely because of this. That said, I do still listen to him because that vitriol and frustration does seem to come from a good place and genuine frustration.

A lot of OP seems to be him complaining about that same behavior in users, which is straight up hypocrisy. It’s bad for his mental health when people do it to him, but he’s not part of the problem or anything.

Or you start buying a GPU that actually supports linux? If you buy a proprietary product with no actual linux support, then why are you complaining to the unpaid volunteer to fix it, and not the multi-billion dollar company you just made several hundred dollars richer?

It does support Linux, just fine, on x11... It's also the only option for a significant portion of machine learning software.

Meanwhile we (or at least I) aren't asking any unpaid volunteers to fix anything. We're asking them to stop claiming their new software works for practically every use case when it doesn't, nothing more.

Bingo! I’m also asking him to maybe be less of a jerk about it.

He complains about users not using his software while also (literally) saying “fuck you nvidia”.

Hypocrite much? I’m a former GNOME software foundation member and was on the GNOME sysadmin team. I literally used to have root on gnome.org. I’m not the enemy here, but I’m being made out to be one because I use hardware that OSS stuff does not reliably support.

> We're asking them to stop claiming their new software works for practically every use case

Who is 'them' here? Is that Drew DeVault, or can you point to someone else specifically?

In general I don't want to name individuals, because I don't think that's productive. "Them" is a convenient way of keeping arguments from being overly personal.

In this specific case I guess it is fair to say it's Drew, since he wrote the article we're commenting on. I don't think he's alone in his statements on wayland though.

CUDA is primarily developed for Linux. You’re showing me that you totally misunderstand the problem by assuming Nvidia doesn’t build these GPUs for Linux. There is a reason that Nvidia gpus + Linux servers top the top 500 supercomputer list. It is because they’re built to work together:

Nvidia supports exactly one use case on Linux: running their GPUs in servers or workstations purely with their proprietary drivers purely for ML and CAD work.

Everything else is completely unsupported, and if you’ve got an issue with that, you’ve got to complain to Nvidia, not open source projects.

You expect a single unpaid volunteer maintaining a wayland compositor alone to somehow be able to add support for nvidias badly documented custom format?

I don't expect anything from anyone, it's about what I need. I need Nvidia GPUs in my setup to run my trainings. If Wayland maintainers wants me to move on from X11 they will have to make it work. Right now they don't want to (which is fine!) but that means I can say I do not consider Wayland to be a viable alternative to X11 for me.

Precisely! And this isn't "anti-Wayland horseshit" so much as it is simply Wayland is not viable for your use case and mine as well. He insults nvidia, insults nvidia users, and then complains that people don't want to use wayland. Very unprofessional and laughable that he expects people to agree with his POV.

More than CAD work. I'm a little out of the loop these days, but as of a few years ago, Nvidia cards were greatly preferred for all 3D work, including animation packages such as Maya. The Nouveau drivers just don't cut it for that sort of work.

"Guy who tells me I'm an idiot for using hardware to do my job also says he is tired of users not wanting to use wayland" - I think he should read the book "How to win friends and influence people", because telling people they are idiots for using hardware they have to use and then complaining they don't want to use his stuff is pretty hilarious and pathetic.

I'm not asking him to suddenly love Nvidia, but there has to be some compromise here. Nvidia works wonderfully on linux for desktop + x11 (with 4 x 4k monitors mind you) and for CUDA. I'd love for the nvidia proprietary drivers to support wayland, but I'm also tired of his hyperbole about bad users who don't want to use wayland.

Not defending the author, but aren't you totally misunderstanding the fact that Nvidia providing excellent CUDA support is irrelevant to this conversation? The fact is Nvidia has a long history of providing the bare minimum to Linux desktop users, even on X11.

Hell, I can't even fix the screen-tearing or get Optimus to work with Nvidia's proprietary drivers with X11 on my GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q laptop. It may be 'usable' in a sense that it doesn't crash, but the number of graphical glitches that I run into every single day (literally opening my laptop requires me to refresh every window) that I never run into with Intel or AMD kind of proves to me how much Nvidia cares about desktop usage.

Drew Devault might be a jerk (not my words) and have a lot of fallacies in his arguments, but that doesn't mean you should be doing the same thing.

Also worth noticing, there are other operating systems that does not use the Linux kernel. FreeBSD does have an official Nvidia driver (although a pretty limited in term of framework suppot) and Nouveau is not ported anymore. The AMD drivers are a port of the Linux drivers and are usually some versions behind because it is work to port them. So it means that I cannot try out sway on my laptop, and as I am not planning to buy a new laptop in the next few years, it is not something I can try soon. Sure I can just run Linux and I do on another drive, but I just end up with X so I can share configurations.

I don't think Nouveau ever was ported before. I actually tried it myself (unsuccessfully). Kind of a painful codebase.

> usually some versions behind

Currently on 5.4-5.5, only Big Navi is not supported yet. With the state of the GPU market right now, we'll probably catch up before the prices on those become sane :D

Funnily enough, it's Intel that's slowing the updates down more than anything. amdgpu is rarely an early adopter of new Linux kernel API surface. i915 is very much one, all the time.

It was a very long time ago (long enough for 'xf86' naming) https://www.freshports.org/x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau

No, xf86 naming is still there, but you're kinda misunderstanding what a driver is. These xf86 things are tiny pieces for the xorg server. (Irrelevant with Wayland, obviously.) The real "meat" of the driver is in two places: Mesa and the kernel. The kernel module is the hard part. You can install the higher level parts without it, they just won't be useful. You can have the xf86 thing, and libdrm_nouveau, and Mesa dri_nouveau, they don't even require any porting, but they're absolutely useless without the kernel driver, they wouldn't have anything to talk to.

In their defence until a few years ago it was nvidia that had the good linux drivers while AMD was stuck with bad ones. The tables turned after AMDGPU as far as I know.

That’s true, but that’d mean running a 900 series Nvidia card or even earlier, which wouldn’t be able to handle multiple 4K monitors natively at 60Hz with or without the proprietary driver.

Which means that the author bought an nvidia GPU at a point in time when it was already obvious that nvidia would treat linux as a second class citizen.

And even if not, you should first complain to the company you paid hundreds of dollars to, not the unpaid volunteers.

Nvidia treats Linux as a first class citizen. In fact, the CUDA stuff on Linux is industry leading. As a result, machine learning on Nvidia is really good. I work with Nick Wilt, the author of the book on CUDA. Nvidia on Linux is amazing. Nvidia on Linux without X11 (for guis) is not, sadly.

Well, there is a solution: either buy another video card for graphics, or use iGPU. And leave the nvidia one for CUDA only.

This is in a work issued computer, so no, this is not a valid solution.

Then add an RX480 4GB as secondary GPU for desktop usage, and only use the nvidia card for CUDA?

Or rather, complain to your IT to do so.

> Or you start buying a GPU that actually supports linux?

People usually don't get to chose what HW the company buys for them and, anecdotally, "the component X doesn't work with Wayland" rarely makes a difference.

I've tried Wayland many times a year over the past 5 years.

I still only get a black screen.

X11 just works.

Or just use KDE Wayland, they support it fine.

Does it? I run KDE on my desktop PC with has a GTX 1080 inside it, and whenever I experimentally turn on Wayland, I get a black screen. Been like that forever.

Re: NVIDIA, announced on Jan 7:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G...

> This work will hopefully land in time for the start of standalone XWayland releases separate from the xorg-server. Those should begin this spring in time for the Fedora 34 release as likely the first distribution shipping standalone XWayland packages.

> With this and other NVIDIA proprietary driver work pending to improve the Wayland support, hopefully by Ubuntu 21.10 we see GNOME on Wayland by the default so that for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also that shift away from X.Org.

"rejects anyone who wants to use an nvidia graphics card." Yes this part is true. "my option is to use an "evil" but very stable driver and no wayland to do my job and get paid, or not." So what is the problem? That you can't have nice things for free?

As someone with an nvidia card, it rubs me the wrong way that he says “Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase.”

If he wants someone like me to use wayland, that’s the problem. If he doesn’t want me to use it, then there’s no problem. But I think this guy isn’t just maintaining it. He’s evangelizing it too, right? Get rid of the old broken X11 and come to the promised land of wayland where we fixed x11’s woes. And if it doesn’t work for you:

> Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago.

He seems to be saying it works and you’re dumb if you think it doesn’t. And at the same time saying he won’t support maybe the most common cards out there.

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