This was not like that before their Tesla series took off with such momentum.Currently, X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people.
I think some parts of their drivers do some black magic, because if that was not the case, there should not be a tug of war about the technical details for providing Wayland support.
Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly, but not the CUDA parts, because it’s the money making part.
I've been running NVIDIA GPUs on Linux workstations in personal and professional settings for almost 20 years. It's been always been an extremely functional and high performance experience.
It's annoying that the drivers are proprietary, and have to be rebuilt during kernel upgrades, but they have worked very well for a long time.
It would of course be better if the drivers where OSS and integrated in the kernel, but for more than a decade Nvidia was the only option for high performance graphics on Linux (Intel always had very good stable OSS drivers but not the hardware to match).
For AI work, their cards are great, yes. Also for accelerated science. We have quite a few of their cards at the bottom floor, churning out number non-stop.
However, desktop experience with their cards are constantly degrading after Tesla got up to speed. VSync can't be enabled without losing 25% performance hit. DPMS support was broken for 1.5 years on DisplayPort. Then, DisplayPort started to lose link when you turn off your monitor for whatever reason.
These things add-up, and when your card is deprecated you can't move to open drivers even if said drivers have lower performance, it breaks the camel's back.
If you're on the happy path (hardware + software wise), NVIDIA is great, and if you don't, you're too poor for NVIDIA and they can't be bothered.
So no, I'll not be buying NVIDIA card for my desktop use.
Non-Windows desktop users definitely don’t seem to be among Nvidia’s chief concerns.
There were probably about 1000x more Linux desktop users than Mac Pro users willing to install their own aftermarket GPU even when this was a thing.
It’s hard to tell how numerous this group was, but I saw them come up surprisingly often in photos and discussions online, even appearing in production environments (despite legal dodginess). Wouldn’t be surprised if at times this is where most Nvidia cards purchased for use with macOS were sold.
That Linux hobbyist market is barely relevant. Desktop Linux is supported by Nvidia because it is a big thing in the SFX industry.
Linux has been supported before their were data center cards. Before GPU compute was a thing there was workstations which are in fact still a thing.
> Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly,
In 20 years of usage this appears to be inaccurate. I'm not even 100% sure what your GPU has to do with monitor power management fails which historically consist wholly and only of distros/desktops setting the sleep threshold way to short and whatever half assed hack is being used to keep their machine from turning the monitor off in the middle of their youtube video fails to work properly. The solution as with a lot of over-complicated things is simplicity. Set the threshold far higher and if you actually want the monitor to shut off do so. In any case it again has little to do with your GPU
> X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people.
Not sure where this is coming from at all. X11 support has pretty much always been great. The most reasonable thing to suppose is that the Linux desktop ecosystem has been historically somewhat fragile especially if you insist on the latest and greatest and that Nvidia due to open source unfriendliness seems to catch a greater than average share of the blame.
Someone will post a random thread on a entirely unrelated matter without even mentioning nvidia and somewhere down thread someone will be blaming Nvidia.
> Well recently my cat got the mange...
>> Are you running NVIDIA? It's known to cause that.
>>> Oh ya I installed NVIDIA recently and my cat is 100% dead!
>>>> My neighbor installed NVIDIA and my cat is now a dog
Look at this singular thread where NVIDIA is assigned the blame for flaky wifi, bluetooth, and display power management.
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
People still search for reasons to shit on it because they don’t like the company in general and want to back AMD. Nothing is or ever will be good enough for the haters.
http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
It's software development, if you're searching for a reason to be discontented, you're always going to find one, it's clearly an unfalsifiable situation for people who just dislike the company on personal grounds.
I just wish they'd let the nouveau developers do their thing.
Its been painless to install closed source nvidia drivers for 20 years so long as your distro provides a package.
This also won't install all the horrible security nightmares that come with the Windows drivers, as that stuff doesn't exist on Linux.
So overall a much better experience than on Windows.
In the end, Windows has more users that report bugs on fewer setups. That makes fixing things much easier than Linux.
AMD drivers are built into the kernel and work out of the box, but they're still buggy. In my experience, at least 3 times I couldn't boot after a kernel upgrade due to buggy Vega64 drivers.
"Nvidia, fuck you" - https://youtu.be/i2lhwb_OckQ