Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever

[elipsey]

maybe it's the black jacket/white shirt ensemble. check the first frame of the vid.

[Rallos Zek]

I agree fully with Mr Torvalds.







Nvidia Fuck You!

[kraftman]

Maybe the worst for kernel developers, but for now it seems to be the least problematic for end users.

[0xBADCODE]

NVIDIA's press release response:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show....php?p=2565191

Those pathetic losers have comments closed. They probably could guess that their lie would otherwise could be challenged. User experience? Ha-ha, when you install Linux and it's built-in opensource driver is half-working, this is very awkward experience. And downloading some blob from hell knows where and why is so Windws way of doing the things... something that Nvidia fails to understand all the time.

[Teho]

User experience? Ha-ha, when you install Linux and it's built-in opensource driver is half-working, this is very awkward experience. And downloading some blob from hell knows where and why is so Windws way of doing the things... something that Nvidia fails to understand all the time.

Maybe you should use more user friendly distribution then? Ubuntu provides easy installer for propietary drivers and distributions like Chakra install with them by default.

[Kano]

And do you know a distribution with working bumblebee support out of the box? preinstalling nvidia drivers and enabling on boot is not that hard, implemented it in several ways during the last years. also acritox had one very interesting approach we used for kanotix hellfire.

[XorEaxEax]

I think Linus is over-esteeming himself though.

Based on what?

Ehhhh... Not sure that Linux "dominates" in the server space (assuming that "majority" doesn't translate to "dominate", and even then "majority" is questionable depending on which stats one looks at). Depends on the server type I guess.

I was relating to the other free server OS, BSD*, and Linux is indeed dominating the BSD's in the server space.

where I intended to point out that consumer-oriented software and hardware were, for a long time, not supported on Linux. I remember the days where "if it's not open source, GTFOff my system" were quite commonplace.

Well that's up to each and everyone, obviously the hardnosed policy against proprietary drivers has served Linux incredibly well as it boasts the highest out-of-the-box hardware support by far and ALSO has support from proprietary drivers while other systems like the BSD's/Solaris etc which has more stable ABI's and doesn't make it hard for proprietary drivers have nowhere near the hardware support Linux does.

Linux does dominate the HPC sector... of which some of those systems are hooked into NVIDIA GPUs driven by those awfully horrible NVIDIA drivers.

NVidia makes drivers for Linux because Linux is big in 3D/SFX/HPC/Supercomputers/Clusters, not the other way around. If you (like me) use NVidia on the desktop, know that NVidia doesn't give a shit about _you_, they are offering their quality proprietary for Linux because it's used by big companies in the aforementioned sectors. This is reflected in commercial software aswell, Linux despite it's tiny desktop marketshare has the latest versions of top-of-the-line 3D software like Maya, XSI, Mudbox, Renderman, etc this is because the big 3D/SFX companies who have been using Linux as their high performance rendering farms now also wants to use it across their entire pipelines.

On the desktop -- one of the biggest OS markets -- obviously Linux is practically non-existent. That's not by accident.

Windows dominates the desktop, and nothing else comes close, and that's not by accident but due to it coming preinstalled. Apple did a big push with an huge ad campaign including product placement in just about everything on tv and film which landed them ~10% market share after which they seem to have lost competitive interest in the desktop computer and instead is pushing tablets. There's no company other than Apple who has the financial means to go up against Microsoft which comes preinstalled on just about every desktop computer out there and if they can't compete then there's no chance anyone else could either. Secondly, unless you make a proprietary commercial os there's no money to make in the desktop space as it's not as if you can realistically make money selling support to desktop end users.

On the other hand, no other system than Windows will ever be big on the desktop either, simply because unless Microsoft does something INCREDIBLY stupid (and no, not even Metro is stupid enough) the vast majority of people will not see any reason to switch operating systems from the one that came installed. They don't really care what OS it is as long as it launches their favourite webbrowser and games, as is being proven by how so many of the 'casual' computer users are now finding their needs fully satisfied by Ipads, which in turn is what is making Microsoft shit bricks and run with the Metro concept across the board, but hey, that's another story entirely.

But that's ok, Linux will never be 'big' on the desktop, I have no problem with that. It's fully useable for me and a much better experience than what I had with Windows (up until XP64, I left the platform entirely as Vista started approaching). It's also free, fast, minimal on resources and open source.

Not to mention that Android's popularity would have been completely impossible if it weren't for the proprietary, closed-source binary blobs that people on this website are so frequent to deem the equivalent of Satan's spawn.

Impossible? So you can't make a mobile smartphone without NVidia, or more to the point, without proprietary drivers?

And without Android Linux would be, again, practically non-existent in the mobile space... as it was just a short couple of years ago.

Is there a point to this? What exactly are you arguing?

So personally I think Linus came off as a real childish turd. NVIDIA has helped and supported Linux plenty, in its own way, and much more than most companies out there have.

NVidia hasn't supported 'Linux', they are supporting their customers who choose to run Linux. Those customers in question are not desktop users like you and me, whom NVidia wouldn't waste spit on but rather the large companies using Linux in the aforementioned sectors. Those large companies aren't interested in using Optimus and as such NVidia won't support it on Linux, because again they don't give a shit about Linux desktop end users.

[johnc]

Those pathetic losers have comments closed. They probably could guess that their lie would otherwise could be challenged. User experience? Ha-ha, when you install Linux and it's built-in opensource driver is half-working, this is very awkward experience. And downloading some blob from hell knows where and why is so Windws way of doing the things... something that Nvidia fails to understand all the time.

Just to clarify:

That forum is not operated, owned or in any way financially supported by NVIDIA. Developers do visit the forum to take bug reports and post driver release announcements.

When this topic was raised, the administrator / owner asked that it not be discussed on his forum. After which the forum suffered a significant amount of downtime. After being restored he posted the PR from NVIDIA and I haven't seen the topic been mentioned since.

[0xBADCODE]

Maybe you should use more user friendly distribution then? Ubuntu provides easy installer for propietary drivers and distributions like Chakra install with them by default.

In fact I use user-friendly Ubuntu most of time for desktop, but:
1) I like when hardware works out of the box. Have you ever heard Plug-n-play word? Nvidia surely got it Windows way.
2) And no, thank you, if I'll want smth full of blobs "by default", there is already Windows. No need for yet another cheap imitation.
3) Distro maintainers are very limited in options when it comes to bugfixing and adaptation. And it's very noticeable in term of long standing bugs.
4) Proprietary blob is inherently foreign stuff in opensource system. This implies bugs. From my experience, many unsuccessful OS upgrades to new Ubuntu version were due to to proprietary drivers.
5) I trust to maintainers and opensource sw authors far more than I trust to some suspicious company and their uber-secret blobs.
6) I don't see what's wrong if Aveage Joe (or me, you, whoever) would want to create own flavour of distro. However proprietary things not like free software. Free software welcomes this. Proprietary prohibits this. As for me, it's wrong to cripple this degree of freedom and smells like unfair competition.
7) Even more, this puts less popular OSes at competetive disadvantage. I don't see why it should be forbidden to Haiku, NetBSD or whoever to try create fully-functional driver using kernel interface convenient for them. Who loses? Customers. They miss extra chance for new fresh competetive upstarts. It's wrong.
8) On it's own, PCI-E is a platform-neutral bus. There is nothing wrong to have it on ARM, MIPS, PPC or whatever else. There is nothing wrong in putting any PCI-E device on any device with PCI-E bus. Artificially limiting it to x86 only is wrong way of doing things. It backstabs new developments once more. So less innovations, less competition. Let it stuck and rot. Who loses? Customers again.
9) You see, if all people would become worthless consumers, we'll face huge troubles. As a civilization. So someone have to develop things further. Raising barriers on this way is wrong. That's why "I have all things working!" counts for you but does not counts for rest of world. If there will be no developers, things will get stuck.
10) Nvidia don't respects other devs, forcing them to waste their time on reverse engineering. So why devs should show any respect? It's just a proper thing to show them finger for such hostility to developers.

[0xBADCODE]

When this topic was raised, the administrator / owner asked that it not be discussed on his forum.

So now there is also censorship to shut up those unhappy with nvidia policy and hence interferring with their fat profits . That's what I would expect from proprietary companies and their fans. They always have to resort to tyranny and screw up someone, one way or another. And that's one of reasons why I dislike propritary approach.