NVIDIA have announced some big changes are coming to their Linux drivers, which will start with the upcoming 560 series.
  • taanegl@beehaw.org
    533·
    7 months ago

    It’s a weird time to live in, but not confusing. It’s obvious to see that what you really want as a vendor is control over the operating system stack itself, and relying on Microsoft has become challenging.

    In essence what NVIDIA is doing is bringing it’s entire GPU driver stack open source side, so that entire industries say go on buying tons more hardware.

    Us Linux enthusiasts get to reap the benefit, what with entire open source movements bringing libraries to Linux side first that can turn GPU hardware into whatever tool you’d like. Projects like PyTorch and ffmpeg run as first class citizens on Linux.

    Windows still relies on either shared DotNet stack (which will make a monkey out of you - cough cough) or the nearly ancient MSYS2 build environment. Microsoft of course prefers you run all that software inside their Linux container system known as WSL - and there’s a reason for that.

    The Linux graphics stack is looking more “feature complete” by the month, bringing up the question of where you actually get the best hardware support. This is a good question to have.

    Now, if only the open source desktop movements could clean house, figure out funding and get their stacks in order, we might finally, for the umpteenth time, maybe see the year of the Linux desktop.

    I grow old with anticipation, but seeing what NVIDIA did in the before time versus what they do in the now puts a smirk on this haggered face.

    Onwards to the future.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
        14·
        7 months ago

        Trust their motivation. They are worried that ai including LLM processing will be mainly on Linux and they’ll be left behind. They are just following where they think the money will be. It just happens to be good for Linux and consumer choice, but that’s a side effect, not the reason.

      • taanegl@beehaw.org
        2·
        7 months ago

        You seem to conflate “trust” with “optimism”.

        Let me just make it clear, having kernel land drivers and user space drivers open source and working together is a good thing.

        Sure, you’ll have to agree to a licence when installing CUDA, which will probably never be open source, but as long as the GPU hardware can be used out of the box with open source drivers means that we’ve come a long way.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
      31·
      7 months ago

      Now, if only the open source desktop movements could clean house, figure out funding

      i always say this has to be done at the license level. gpl but paid for corporations.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      17·
      7 months ago

      If they’re proactive about taking patches this will really help reduce issues with the dkms driver

  • YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee
    251·
    7 months ago

    I’ve procrastinated getting an AMD gpu for so long that I’m not going to need one! It’s still fuck you nvidia, I’m not a goldfish.

    • SunRed@discuss.tchncs.de
      17·
      7 months ago

      You have to keep in mind that this is only about the kernel module (and only for Turing GPUs and newer). The userspace components stay proprietary. You are still not going to use the mesa graphics stack using an Nvidia gpu anytime soon.

      • joojmachine@lemmy.mlOP
        4·
        7 months ago

        with the recent development in NVK and Nouveau (and futurely Nova), you probably will relatively soon

  • NGC2346@sh.itjust.works
    121·
    7 months ago

    Personally i still got Windows on a second SSD for gaming as ive had a more reliable experience there than on any linux i’ve used as daily drivers (Arch, Endeavour, Debian and now Fedora 40)…

    That being said, does this mean better compatibility with, say, Wayland for example ? I would like to completely ditch Windows but this aspect has been holding me back from a complete switch for years.