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Comment by stabbles | Hacker News Reader

Now that the majority of their revenue is from data centers instead of Windows gaming PCs, you'd think their relationship with Linux should improve or already has.

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Nvidia segments its big iron AI hardware from the consumer/prosumer segment. They do this by forbidding the use of GeForce drivers in datacenters[1]. All that to say, it is possible for the H100 to to have excellent Linux support, while support for the 4090 is awful.

1. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

They have been making real improvements the last few years. Most of their proprietary driver code is in firmware now, and the kernel driver is open-source[1] (the userland-side is still closed though).

They've also significantly improved support for wayland and stopped trying to force eglstreams on the community. Wayland+nvidia works quite well now, especially after they added explicit sync support.

1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/

>complicated

... as in remember the time a ransomware hacker outfit demanded they release the drivers or else .....

https://www.webpronews.com/open-source-drivers-or-else-nvidi...

Because red hat announced that next RHEl is going tone Wayland only, that why they fixed all that you said, they don't care about users, only servers

It's possible. I haven't had a system completely destroyed by Nvidia in the last few years, but I've been assuming that's because I've gotten in the habit of just not touching it once I get it working...

I got similar experience. I really prefer switch CUDA version with whole PC machine. What is more, the speed and memory of hardware improves quickly in time as well.

I update drivers regularly. I've only had one display failure and was solved by a simple rollback. To be a bit fair (:/) it was specifically a combination of new beta driver and a newer kernel. It's definitely improved a ton since 10 years ago I just would not update them except very carefully.

I've bricked multiple systems just running apt install on the Nvidia drivers. I have no idea how, but I run the installation, everything works fine, and then when I reboot I can't even boot.

That was years ago, but it happened multiple times and I've been very cautious ever since.

Interesting. I've never had that issue (~15 years experience) but I always had CPUs with graphics drivers. Do you think that might be it? The danger zone was always at `startx` and never before. (I still buy CPUs with graphics drivers because I think it is always good to have a fallback and hey, sometimes I want to sacrifice graphics for GPU compute :)

I have been having a fine time with a 3080 on recent Arch, FWIW.

HDR support is still painful, but that seems to be a Linux problem, not specific to Nvidia.

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