923
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
923 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37708 readers
417 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Please help me understand why this is such a huge issue.
For many reasons. Nvidia requiring secure boot in this case, which is not available for all distros or kernels on all computers.
The other is requiring a workable kernel module and user space component from Nvidia, which means that as soon as Nvidia deprecates your hardware, you're stuck with legacy drivers, legacy kernels, or both.
Nvidia also has it's own separate userspace stack, meaning it doesn't integrate with the whole DRM & Mesa stack everyone else uses. For the longest time that meant no Wayland support, and it still means you're limited to Gnome only on wayland when using Nvidia AFAIK.
Another issue is switcheable graphics. Since systems with switchable graphics typically combine a Mesa based driver stack (aka everyone but Nvidia, but typically this would be AMD or Intel integrated graphics) with an Nvidia one, it involves swapping out the entire library chain (OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever libraries). This is typically done by using ugly hacks (wrapper scripts using LD_PRELOAD for example) and are prone to failure. Symptoms can be anything as mild as everything running on the integrated graphics, the discrete graphics never sleeping causing poor battery life or high power consumption, to booting to a black screen all or some of the time.
If these things don't bother you or you have no idea what these things mean, or you don't care about them or your hardware lasting more than 3-5y then it probably isn't a big deal to you. But none of the above exist when using Intel, AMD or a mix of those two.
In my experience the past twenty years, proprietary drivers are the root cause of I would say 90% of my issues using Linux.