Why does Nvidia hate linux?

amd didn't care a few years ago, but their drivers are open, so the community can fix it even if the company don't care(now amd care a lot more, so it's better) nvidia is a closed source crap, and it don't give a fuck too

And they can't get all those sweet sweet tracking data they get from Windows users

I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I've not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it's made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.

Yeah they don't hate Linux, they just have their own priorities. That said I'm running Nvidia+Wayland happily, for desktop they have worked a lot more on Wayland this year, the upcoming driver fixes a bunch of things, and my distrib handled driver installation and updates, I never have to think about it.

i totally agree with that whack-a-mole analogy. what, you're on debian or any debian-based distro? well, my friend, good luck ever waking up from suspend! no error logs, no crash reports, nothing. So i'm on arch right now. Annoying, because i prefer getting stuff done instead of yelling at my bluetooth driver, but at least the nvidia drivers work most of the time :)

sorry, rant over

It just makes no sense to me though, how is it sustainable for nvidia to not have great Linux kernel support? Like, let the kernel maintainers do their job and reap the benefits. I'm guessing that nvidia sees enterprise support contracts as an essential revenue stream, but eventually even enterprises are going to go with hardware that Linus isn't giving the finger to right? Am I crazy?

This is my life now.

It took a little tweaking but I have Iray and Dforce working for Daz3D under Wine, and FFXIV runs great with it as well. Also got Stable Diffusion running last night without any issues.

All the issues I've had have been requiring extra packages or installing some random github nvlibs, and kernel parameters. So as a user, the fact that my nvidia card didn't work painlessly out of the box without additional configs doesn't seem like an Nvidia problem...

That's not true. Some companies contribute. AMD does a great job fostering open source software. This is an Nvidia issue. They are a plague and I hope they one day lose market share for it.

I want to turn my cheap card into an expensive card with little programming

This. I bet the experience is better if you use it on an enterprise distro they have precompiled drivers for.

With the boom in AI their focus is increasingly on the data center market, so it's a small miracle (thanks Red Hat and others prodding them) they even have an open driver right now for newer cards (tellingly it's in a better state for computational use than for rendering pixels on the screen)

I’m gonna be that person…

Well, you are not alone. While I too would prefer not to use proprietary drivers, I have had no problems on any of my Nvidia machines as well. Ironically, despite the open source drivers, getting a 7900XTX card up and running was an issue for me for months till distros caught up (with newer kernels and mesa libs), while my 4090 installation was a breeze even on the day it was released.

A lot of problems people have with Nvidia GPUs seem to be installation related. I think that is because the installation tends to be distro-specific and people do not necessarily follow the correct procedure for their distro or try installing the drivers directly from the Nvidia site as they would on Windows. For example, Fedora requires you to add RPMFusion, Debian needs non-free to be added to sources, Linux Mint lets you install the proprietary drivers but only after the first boot, and so on. Pop OS! probably makes the process the easiest with their Nvidia-specific ISO.

Minimal issues here. Set up Arch, install nVidia, add build hooks before next kernel update, carry on.

I have a 3080 and it runs fine with openSUSE Tumbleweed. On first boot you do need to add the nvidia repo and then install it which I guess could be problematic for new linux users, but it's literally pasting 1 line into terminal and then clicking the driver in yast. Echoing what others have said, I'd prefer if nvidia was a little less hostile to open source but frankly the driver just works, and works well. The only thing I've used besides openSUSE lately is Pop_OS and I believe the nvidia driver was installed automatically. If someone is having trouble getting the driver installed that seems to be a failure of the distro, not the user. You should be able to depend on your distros packaging to take care of this stuff.

is it because I’m happy staying on X11?

I think this is a big part of it. I have no issues with Nvidia + X11, however if I try to use Wayland with my 2080 I get numerous issues that has me running back to Xorg very quickly.

Same. I had an Nvidia 960 for about 5 years on arch with very few problems. Maybe twice over that time I had to rollback to an older version temporarily due to some incompatibility with wine or such like.

Towards the end of last year I finally decided to upgrade (mostly to play RDR2) and I went with AMD. I love the feel of using a pure open source gfx stack, but there is no real functional advantage to it.

There is definitely some substance behind the complaints, but I think they are overblown or just the typical linux-user-parroting something they heard other people say.

On PopOS my 3070ti was always stable. I ran into occasional stuttering in the DE, but the biggest thing was I had to manual compile shaders using some guys github repo to play Apex Legends without it being a stuttery mess. But like you said, Pop is on X11 so maybe that makes a difference?

I bought into the "if you are going to use linux, especially for gaming, you need an amd gpu." So I bought a 6900xt. I've had as many issues with my 6900xt; they are just different types of issues. Nothing insurmountable but its not like its some panacea.

I use Ubuntu and Nvidia 3080 and the only issue I have had was when Steam updated their Big Picture Mode. I was using Wayland and it broke with the new Big Picture Mode. I had to switch back to x11 and it works well with that. I do hope Nvidia and Steam fix the Wayland issue. I'd rather use Wayland.

I have been using my Linux Gaming PC for for a couple of years now. I jumped ship with the ad riddled Windows 11. And I have been very happy with Steam/Proton gaming.

But not the fancy machine learning acceleration

I did have many regrets. Mainly overheating and the card eventually failing on me. Funny how these large companies ship their shit to "third world countries" so that people have a lower chance of returning their POS

Relevant xkxd

They certainly have plenty of that, there... a friend told me.

For what it's worth, NVIDIA's failings on Linux tend to be mostly in the desktop experience. As a compute device driven by cuda and not responsible for the display buffer, they work plenty good. Enterprise will not be running hardware GUI or DEs on the machines that do the AI work, if at all.

Nvidia is a breeze on linux vs amd. cuda is the only thing meaningfully supported across Windows and Linux. I fought with my 6900xt for so long trying to get ROCm working that I eventually bought a used 1080ti just to do the AI/ML stuff I wanted to do. I threw that into a server and had everything up and running in literally 10 minutes (and 5 minutes was making proxmox pass the gpu through to the VM).

People want to bitch about nvidia, but their entire ecosystem is better than AMD. The documentation is better and the tooling is better. On paper AMD is competitive but in practice Nvidia has so much more going for it--especially if you are doing any sort of AI/ML.

There are some benefits to to amd on linux; its the reason I replaced my 3070ti for a 6900xt. But that experience taught me: 1. AMD isn't as good on linux as people give it credit for 2. nvidia isn't as bad on linux as people blame it for. You trade different issues. Eg. Lose nvenc and cant use amf unless you use the amdpro driver not the open source one. if you use the pro driver you immediately lose half the benefits of the open source driver which is probably why you switch to amd on linux to begin with. So if you game, you can't stream with a decent encoder--so you have to play with settings and throw cpu horsepower at it.

But hey, my DE doesn't stutter and I dont have to do kludgy workarounds to get some games to play.

Their enterprise stuff works like a charm on Linux

When I built my pc, I made sure to get AMD because of the nvidia outcry from the linux community. Thank goodness I got a 6800xt. I haven't had any problems with it. It worked straight out of the box.

While I'm using AMD, I have had no issues with Nvidia on Arch using X before I switched earlier this year. One just installs the nvidia or nvidia-dkms package. My main reasons to switch were I had a 1060 6GB and it was getting old, AMD had a better price and if I'm keeping this one as long as my last I wanted to be certain wayland support was good even though I don't use it right now

Even when we all perish, this meme will remain.

Yes. Whenever it's fitting to say "fuck Nvidia!" So likely forever and ever and always.

You could just as yourself: has anything changed or is the situation still the same?

This meme will never die unless Intel and AMD surpasses NVIDIA on everything

b-but muh free karmuh

@danielton
@Mr_Esoteric
>But yet, it seems like the majority of Linux users have nvidia anyway.

Probably becouse it's more popular among windows users, so when most people switch to linux from Windows, they use the hardware they already had, which more often than not includes an nvidia GPU

Nvidia seems to hate everybody except Windows for some reason.

It's called money. Microsoft and all these big tech companies have lots of agreements with eachother to support certain choices and ignore others. This is also why Lenovo has very limited choice of amd processors, and if they put that in, it's in a model with other serious flaws.

Those are different drivers, or rather different parts of the driver.

CUDA has been a staple in HPC for years now and the situation didn't exactly improve.

They dont see a reason to their biggest buyers are in enterprise level and will pay for the extra support.

Common ML/AI stuff already work on AMD albeit not optimally (Tensorflow, Pytorch) and even some projects already work on AMD (e.g Stable Diffusion). Users are far better off creating a more generic branch for projects that would support CPU based acceleration (via both Intels and AMDs inclusion of AI acceleators in their products) then to hope Nvidia of all companies mess with their bottom line to give linux proper support.

For now.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the linux kernel, flips the bird to nvidia and they deserve it

It's the creator of the linux kernel. In the video he quote says "fuck you nvidia" lol

Other people have already told you who Linus is but if you want some context for the image it was from a Q&A: https://youtu.be/dmfDaxYhi9I?t=2864

Go to 47:46 if the link starts you at the beginning of the video (he starts to do the hand gesture at 49:28).

Some nerd with an attitude problem and a severe lack of social graces.

How many Hardware supports BSD? That's what I though.

Its an apple situation, if u only support 10 different devices ur BSD developers can focus all its time to fix 3rd partys shity jobs.

It works, not because Nvidia delivered something functional, or that worked for that matter.