Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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Exact figures are hard to come by, but vary from 60-85%; Steam says around 75%[1]. NVIDIA proprietary drivers were immensely popular on both Linux and BSD in the early 2000s when I first got into Linux, and having tried the then-closed source ATI drivers a singular time, I can absolutely attest to why: ATI and NVIDIA were basically the only serious desktop GPU options at the time, and the closed source, I believe Catalyst? drivers were as good as junk. Almost everything about them screamed fucking useless. For a really long time, they defaulted to setting multihead systems up with multiple X displays instead of Xinerama by default, which is so unbelievably user-hostile; it sounds okay on paper, but if you've ever used X with multiple separate displays, you'll understand that it stopped making sense literally the moment Xinerama existed, and it was already quite a thing the late 90s. But after I set up Xinerama, the problems continued into every other aspect of the desktop. In that era, where you pretty much always needed discrete graphics, NVIDIA was your Linux option. No doubt that it's going to change so as long as NVIDIA's Linux desktop support continues to stagnate, or at least stagnate moreso than it adapts.

(I have not used NVIDIA on Linux as a daily driver for five years. I tried it again when the open source kernel driver came around, but quickly switched back after realizing it still wasn't stable enough in Sway or KDE.)

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Steam is going to be heavily skewed Nvidia since many games either need it or run poorly without it. Gamers seem to tolerate an otherwise nearly unusable computer for Nvidia graphics acceleration where most users won't.

Steam merely confirms what I already knew as a long-term Linux user: when it comes to discrete GPUs, NVIDIA has long been the biggest player. This isn't just Linux-specific either, NVIDIA commands a large portion of the GPU market period. Forgetting gamers, NVIDIA has the most robust options for hardware acceleration in many cases, especially for AI use cases like PyTorch, and a lot of productivity tools like Blender. ROCm and HAP exist, but AMD has often struggled to gain widespread support.

If there's any strong evidence that NVIDIA still isn't winning in Linux desktop marketshare, I'd certainly be interested to hear it, and it would be news to me. I can imagine Intel technically has a lot of marketshare due to laptops, but then again, Intel and NVIDIA users are hardly mutually exclusive on laptops, either.

I highly doubt the majority of Linux users have Steam installed, especially the kinds that don't tolerate Nvidia's drivers.

I don't really believe the majority of desktop Linux users have Steam installed. I do believe that the majority of Linux users historically (at least leading into the 2010s) used NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, for a multitude of reasons. Even today where AMD and Intel GPUs are clearly the better option for stability, that doesn't mean they're the best option for doing work with. If anything, gaming on AMD is pretty comparable today, in part thanks to Valve. Productivity on AMD is where things are not in good shape. I wish it weren't so, but compare the CUDA and OpenCL/ROCm ecosystems and it's pretty obvious. Most recently, when AMD released some pretty enticing GPU options into the market, ROCm users were surprised to find that their cards either were entirely unsupported, or support had not yet been stabilized. That's just not how things work with CUDA.

I'd pay for things to get better here. I desperately hope that Vulkan as an option for compute can mature and compete with CUDA, but I also think that to do so, quite an ecosystem will need to be built up around it, even if the API and drivers prove sufficient to work as a solid runtime.

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