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Comment by swetland | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical this is related to steamos/steambox. Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache.

It's very cool that they're starting to drop docs to support the open drivers, but I suspect it's going to be a long road from these small steps to the open drivers being fully competitive with the closed ones...

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Nvidia has been good when it comes to proprietary drivers on Linux, but they've never helped out with open source drivers. Then this happened on the same day as the SteamOS announcement. It's quite a massive coincidence if it is one. Nvidia's refusal to help out with open source drivers has been a controversial issue in the Linux community for at least a decade or so. I'd be very surprised if SteamOS played no role in this.

> they've never helped out with open source drivers

I think that's only true when it comes to 3D drivers. They wrote the 2D nv driver:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/nv/

I do remember people complaining it was full of magic numbers to obfuscate what it was doing but it was indeed open source and written by nvidia.

The nv driver exists for the single purpose of getting into a working desktop, so one can install the proprietary driver.

It is not intended as decent 2D-only driver or anything like that.

I don't know think this is a fair assessment; wouldn't having users fall-back on the vesa driver be sufficient for what you are describing? The nv driver supports extensions like xv, so I've always found it was fine for my 2D needs.

That is the reasoning I've heard (read on the ML) from nvidia employees working on said driver.

Yes, I stand corrected on that.

"Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache."

LOL!

Try getting Optimus working on laptop under Linux. I have a Nvidia video card in my Dell that's basically a paperweight, unless I run Windows.

It's a pain, but at least there's bumblebee. Still gobbles power though...

I wholeheartedly concur. The only piece of kit I had trouble with on a Thinkpad was the Nvidia card, and bumblebee helped a lot here. I haven't really put it to the test though.

I'm in the exact same situation with my Asus laptop.

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