this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Man, I completely forgot about that. That's honestly wild to think about in retrospect...
It's not. It had nothing to do with it. Nvidia was all in with Linux as soon as they realized their hardware could be used for data processing and AI. That realization was way more than a decade ago.
Don't know about "always." In recent years, like the past 10 years, definitely. But I remember a time when Nvidia was the only reasonable recommendation for a graphics card on Linux, because Radeon was so bad. This was before Wayland, and probably even before AMD bought ATI. And it was certainly long before the amdgpu drivers existed.
Yeah it was before AMD did graphics.
ATI had an atrocious closed source driver. I used it ... but it was not good at much of anything.
Nvidia is still rather nice with FreeBSD, because their official proprietary driver there is, well, fully official, while drivers ported from Linux somewhat lag behind and have problems sometimes.
100% bullcrap.
Nvidia's servers for data processing have always run Linux. And you know what those servers run? It's not Windows, that's for sure. So why would they write multiple versions of a driver for the same hardware interface? Their servers use the same drivers that you would use for gaming on a Linux desktop system.
In fact, no version of Windows is supported on their DGX servers, and AFAIK you can't even install Windows on it (even if you managed, it wouldn't be usable).
Long story short, a vendor we were working with (about 6 or 7 years ago now), was working on their Linux version of their SDK. We wanted to do some preliminary testing on Nvidia's new T4s that at this point were only available via Nvidia's testing datacenter (which we had access to).
During a call with some of the Nvidia engineers I had to ask the awkward question of "any chance there's a Windows server we can test on?". I knew it was a cringe question and I died a little during the 10 second silence until one of the Nvidia guys finally replied with "no one uses Windows for this stuff". And he said it slowly like the reply to such a question needed to go slow to be understood, because who else would ask that question unless you're slow in the head?
People say "hostile", but I think a better word is arrogant. They wanted to force the industry to use their own implementations they owned or pioneered like egl-stream instead of open standards. But AMD and Intel have proven that open source graphics drivers not only work, but benefit from being open so that the community can scratch their own itches and fix issues faster.
Yep, Nvidia has never been hostile towards Linux, they benefit from supporting it. They just don't care to support the desktop that much, and frankly neither do AMD or Intel. They often take an extremely long time to fix simple bugs that only effect desktop usage. Fortunately, in their case, the drivers can be fixed by other open source contributors.
Am I missing something here? Nvidia never caved to their demands IIRC