Jim
9 HN mentions · mentioned in 9 months, 2013–2022
1:58 · 950K views · Jun 17, 2012
A two-minute clip of Linus Torvalds at an Aalto University talk telling Nvidia "F_ck you" over its poor Linux support. It is an excerpt of a longer talk.
HN cites it as shorthand for the long-running frustration of the Linux community with Nvidia's drivers, often as a joke or background.
9 comments from Hacker News
You're asking a question with a very complex answer. I'll start with a short answer - AMD wants to have at minimum a reasonably good baseline functionality on linux, out of the box. If that answer doesn't make much sense, please read on for the complex bits. To provide some historical context, Linus gave a VERY public, VERY brutal rant on NVIDIA and their drivers four years ago.[0] At the time, NVIDIA's closed drivers were an opaque blob which basically reimplemented the entirety of OpenGL. These collided with everything else. The open drivers (nouveau) were slow and far behind in features. The situation was bad enough that you couldn't necessarily even install a linux distro on a system with NVIDIA chip because the open drivers wouldn't work well enough for X and/or desktop environment to initialise properly, let alone remain up and functional. In effect, if you wanted to run linux, you were best off without NVIDIA. Fast forward year and a half. NVIDIA had come out and committed to improving the linux driver situation. They still couldn't open source their current-generation drivers, but they had realised the horrible reputation of their hardware on linux was going to be a persistent PR nightmare, and thus an existential threat to their growing mobile division. A space where they were up against Imagination Technologies. (Don't get me started on ImgTec, please...) NVIDIA needed to get their hardware and software processes aligned in a way that they would work reliably out of
What's really stopping us here? For quite some time it was graphics drivers support: this video Is this still the case? I hear from many people that at least on Ubuntu that's no problem anymore. Are the graphics cards still overheating? Any experience in that area? And yes, Valve could've done things better, but it's not that bad, that you couldn't do anything with at. As said, at least on Ubuntu with Steam gaming should be fine. And if we got one thing from Steam it's that more and more games are deployed for Linux as well. Really, why hasn't it lifted off now? Is it really that users are so stupid that they don't see a $0 offer is better than a $100 offer for an OS? Hard to believe.
This is a good technical summary of the impact but I think misses the somewhat emotive history here. See things like this infamous clip from Torvalds[0] for more context on the community sentiment around nvidia in general. [0] this video
NVidia has a history of not playing nice with Linux. Allow me to point to a small comment Linus Torvalds made on Nvidia a while ago (NSFW): this video
You are not wrong "Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever delt with so Nvidia F_ck You!" -- Linus Torvalds [1] [1] this video