Linus Torvalds Discusses the Nvidia Incident

Linus avoids discussing companies on his "naughty list" and emphasizes the positive shift in the commercial environment.

[Oneiric_Benevolence]

"I'm sorry"
Took him 3 milliseconds to realize where he was going lol

[aladdin]

Sadly people ignore the context when this incident happened. It was after a female student complaining about nvidia's optimus causing issues in Linux. Nvidia didn't care about those issue reports at that time. So Torvalds expressed his frustration and empathy with small people who own nvidia customer devices.
Nvidia's Linux support just recently started to improve somewhat after more requests came up from business customers in the pandemic, crypto mining and now a.i. boom. But it is still nowhere near the quality of the linux foss support from other companies. So it is not the finger anymore but still shame on you nvidia. You are an one trillion dollar company and still fail to produce proper linux drivers.

[knghtbrd]

Where the companies are still hostile: Cooling systems. They all have advnaced monitoring and control software for Windows. Yet a high level exec at Corsair straight up told me that Linux doesn't matter and neither do people looking for standards in that space.

Annoyingly the only USB fan control and temperature monitoring solution for Linux that is supported out of the box is a very expensive Corsair product. A few projects exist, but nothing complete, and nothing that integrates with the tools you'd use for monitoring a server, for example.

And Nvidia still deserves to be given the finger.

[sisko]

I don't think so... for my experience, Nvidia on linux still s**k, while Radeon and Intel works flawlessly

[Aeduo]

There's a pretty big difference between being awful and insulting to random individual contributors who are legitimately trying to do well, and entities like businesses, and their representatives either doing absolutely nothing at all or bare-minimum work, when they have the means for considerably more and choose not to use it usefully.

[cybernit]

Imagine if Linus didn't say F*ck Nvidia!.... it would be worse on Linux with Nvidia gpus.... now we see open source Nvidia drivers.... hopefully they improve them for wayland.

[ofoofo]

I bought a Steam Deck recently and was amazed. Very compact PC running Linux. With everything beautifully supported, gyro, touchscreen, wifi, bluetooth, screen with adjustable refresh rate, headphone jack, 3D acceleration, perfectly working suspend&resume, etc... What a dream to have a Linux desktop supported out of the box.

[BryonLape]

I'm old enough to remember when NVidia had the best drivers for Linux.

[rorychivers]

Jensen Huang will get no more of my money

[srees]

Can we say or agree that Linus is probably the biggest technological influencer in the human history

[Evilanious]

Tried it out. It's nowhere close to the first picture that comes up.

[JSDudeca]

I have still had issues with Nvidia drivers an will never use them on my main linux desktop. I have a multi-monitor setup and Nvidia is just too flakey.

[rambo]

Here's hoping he finds a worthy successor or keeps working 10 more years at dude got old man. I hate to think what happens if he leaves and the now obviously compromised foundation takes over.

[vanacid]

nvidia is still a nightmare of closedness. If you are on linux, I wish you don't have an nvidia gpu or your experience will be absolutely horrible. Nothing improved at all.

[twentylush]

now if only nvidia would use that positive shift to make good linux cmake modules for cudatoolkit

[ailuros_]

This year, I had to switch to AMD because updating to certain kernel version would break the Nvidia driver. After several weeks, Nvidia comes with the patch. The drivers are ok for most of the time, but Nvidia is slow to deliver patches even for critical bugs :(

[bingusbongus]

Now, you can get a great gaming and Wayland desktop experience with an RTX 40 series card. My guess, it was Nvidia seeing AMD's dominance in the open-source hardware space which led to companies using AMD GPU hardware in their server spaces and Linux being the top OS for AMD server compatibility.

[ika_]

I've literally never had a problem with Nvidia on Linux and I've used it for years

[paulsaulpaul]

These days we can rely on certain groups to open source Nvidia drivers and similar things for us.

[renegadeace]

Linux hobby installs only worked for me when there was no dedicated GPU.