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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia have always shipped closed-source drivers, despite AMD and Intel providing open source drivers for their GPUs. This made the experience on Linux second class to Windows, where while also closed source, at least you knew that bugs would probably get fixed. Various non-core features simply wouldn't have support on Linux, e.g. Optimus. Also, shipping closed source binaries would limit which kernel you could run to supported versions.

Lastly, of course, this opens the way to non-Linux OSes receiving support as well.

If you just search the web for "Nvidia issues Linux" you'll see quite a few complaints. Particularly from people who have obscure configurations -- they pretty much had no chance of getting anything to work.

This is a good technical summary of the impact but I think misses the somewhat emotive history here.

See things like this infamous clip from Torvalds[0] for more context on the community sentiment around nvidia in general.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw

Don't even have to click to know what that is, first thing that came to mind when I saw this headline

> where while also closed source, at least you knew that bugs would probably get fixed.

Yeah, I waited just 18 months (IIRC) for proper DisplayPort DPMS signalling, so my monitor can sleep.

Linux driver bugs get fixed, albeit accidentally.

I think the GP meant the windows drivers would be fixed; not the linux drivers.

>If you just search the web for "Nvidia issues Linux" you'll see quite a few complaints.

I'd wager that is the BULK of the linux-power-user complaints. I'm definitely never buying NVIDIA again for my next PC. The last time I decided to go for Nvidia was because of their CUDA/ML eco-system.

Next time I'll just use the cloud for any ML/GPU-computing. The amount of time wasted by nvidia-driver nonsense is actually absurd !

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