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Comment by user3939382

14 hours ago

Modern GPU drivers are a nightmare for open source. Wifi no better but slightly less critical. Power management. Forget Linux this should be the year of the NetBSD desktop but we can’t have nice architectures bc of economics in computing. The whole scenario makes sense but the emergent result sucks.

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user3939382

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bayindirh  14 hours ago

> Modern GPU drivers are a nightmare for open source.

Modern NVIDIA drviers. Let me fix that for you.

Intel and AMD has their full stack in mainline already, and AMD made great effort to enable their cards fully under open source drivers, as their agreements and law allows. You can even use HDCP without exposing sensitive parts, if you want.

Intel also works completely fine.

However, NVIDIA's shenanigans and HDMI forum's v2.1 protectionism is something else completely.

  • gf000  13 hours ago

    Modern NVIDIA drivers for their more recent cards are actually okay, again.

    • bayindirh  13 hours ago

      Well, they might work, but they are far from OK.

          - An open source kernel module which talks with the card.
    - A set of closed source GLX libraries for acceleration support.
    - A signed and encrypted firmware which only works with this closed source driver package to enable the card.

      Nouveau drivers are intentionally crippled with a special firmware which enables the card to show a desktop, with abysmal performance and feature set.

      Nothing is OK about that.

      3 replies →

  • anthk  13 hours ago

    AMD cards need propietary firmware.

    • bayindirh  12 hours ago

      Yes, that's a problem if you want a fully free-software powered system. However, considering how we had firmware since forever, this is a compromise I can personally accept, for now.

      Having a completely Free Software firmware would be great, but I'm not sure barrier to this is as low as Free Software since there's involvement of IP blocks, regulation, misuse of general purpose hardware (like radios) and whatnot.

      I really support an end-to-end Free Software system, but we have some road to go, and not all problems are technical in that regard.

  • plagiarist  11 hours ago

    I went with AMD for compatibility playing games, but AFAICT AMD ROCm is not in a great state for computation. Why can't I have both?

    That's something like what they're describing as "a nightmare," isn't it? "As agreements and law allows," is part of the nightmare. Under a modern OS, it should not be difficult to have the full capability of the hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of hardware you paid for.

  • drowsspa  12 hours ago

    Honestly back when I was still in college one and a half decade ago, it was quite clear the whole Nvidia-only ML and AI libraries weren't a good idea