Comment by simoncion
17 hours ago
Even proprietary drivers can use Mesa. Most of Mesa is MIT-licensed.
It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux, and -as always- Nvidia ignores what everyone else is doing and does their own thing. Sometimes doing their own thing works out really well in the short run, but -long term- they always fall behind.
> It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux
Nvidia cares a lot about Linux. Just... on their terms.
Yeah, Nvidia cares a lot if you are using compute (aka CUDA). If you are using their pure compute offerings, they are really top of the line on performance and tooling.
Though only with commercial distros. If you're using a fixed version of RedHat, SUSE or Ubuntu (which Canonical offers a commercial version), you're fine. Just hope that their support is long enough and NEVER EVER change kernel versions except patches!
If your GPU is older than 5 years, then you're in danger zone and you should have completely replaced your hardware 3 years ago and bought new Nvidia equipment now 10x more expensive!
Terms which famously caused Linus Torvalds to tell them to FU.
With fairness; some things have changed.
The biggest issue was Nvidia's insistence on buffer management with EGLStreams instead of GBM, which broke a lot of desktops. But they forfeit that fight ~4 years ago.
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Having two Mesa installations at once is how you summon dragons to fight. The FOSS Linux ecosystem doesn't really play well with multiple versions of libraries.
They care about Linux, on their own distribution and licensing terms, NVidia even has their own distro.
Like most FOSS done by companies, what they don't care is GPL, which sadly will eventually be meaningless after boomer and Gen X devs that created the GNU movement no longer walk this plane.
There isn't a single embedded OS FOSS alternative to GNU/Linux that uses GPL, including Linux Foundation's own Zephyr.