> What we need? Reliability. And Linux support

Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice! I'm all for open-source in-tree drivers, but in practice, 15 years on, AMD is still buggy on Linux, whereas NVidia works well (not just on Linux but on FreeBSD too).

> I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.

Maybe you should.

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shmerl 6 days ago | parent [-]

> Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice!

Correction - if they care. And they don't care to do it on Linux, so you get them dragging feet for decades for something like Wayland support, PRIME, you name it.

Basically, the result is that in practice they offer abysmally bad support, otherwise they'd have upstream kernel drivers and no userspace blobs. Linux users should never buy Nvidia.

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lmm 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> And they don't care to do it on Linux

I don't understand what you're saying here. I've used NVidia on Linux and FreeBSD a lot. They work great.

If your argument is they don't implement some particular feature that matters to you, fair enough. But that's not an argument that they don't offer stability or Linux support. They do.

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shmerl 5 days ago | parent [-]

Taking very long to implement stuff is a perfect argument of bad support for the platform. Timely support isn't any less important than support in general.

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jpc0 5 days ago | parent [-]

Are you a product manager? Or do you just not see the irony on your comment?

Long term support means my thing that has been working great continues to work great. New feature implementation has nothing to do with that and is arguably directly against long term support.

And Nvidia seems justified in this since effectively no distro dropper X11 until Nvidia had support.

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shmerl 4 days ago | parent [-]

If you think taking decades is an acceptable rate while others do it in a timely manner it's your own problem. For any normal user it's completely unacceptable and is the opposite of great (add to it, that even after decades of dragging their feet they only offer half cooked support and still can't even sort out upstreaming their mess). Garbage support is what it is.

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jpc0 4 days ago | parent [-]

AMD is notorious for not having ROCM support on in production currently sold GPUs, and horrendous bugs that actually make using the devices unusable.

I use AMD gpus on linux, I generally regret not just buying an Nvidia GPU purely because of AMDs lacklustre support for compute use cases in general.

Intel is still too new in the dGPU market to trust and on top of that there is so much uncertainty about whether that entire product line will disappear.

So at this point the CUDA moat makes is a non issue, on top of that what works works and keeps working, whereas with AMD I constantly wonder whether something will randomly not work after an update.

A timeline of decades for “features” your biggest consumers don’t care about is a reasonable tradeoff, even more so if actually pushing those features would reduce stability.

	▲	shmerl 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's exactly the point. Nvidia might care about industrial use cases, while they don't care about desktop Linux usage and their support is garbage in result.

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bigyabai 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wayland support hasn't been an issue since GLX was depreciated for EGLStream. I think the Nvidia backend has been "functional" for ~3 years and nearly flawless for the past year or so.

Both Mutter and KWin have really good Nvidia Wayland sessions nowadays.

	▲	shmerl 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It got better, but my point is how long it took to get better. That's the indicator of how much they care about Linux use cases in general. Which is way below acceptable level - it's simply not their priority (which is also exacerbated by their hostile approach to upstreaming). I.e. if anything new will need something implemented tomorrow, Nvidia will make their users wait another decade again. Which I consider an unacceptable level of support and something that flies in the face of those who claim that Nvidia supports Linux well.

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jgb1984 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been using Nvidia gpus exclusively on debian linux for the past 20 years, using the binary Nvidia drivers. Rock solid stability and excellent performance. I don't care for Wayland as I plan to stay on Xorg + Openbox for as long as I can.