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KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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A sizable percentage of Linux users own Nvidia cards and "just buy something else" is not realistic, for many reasons.
Wayland will eventually have to support Nvidia one way or another. If they're seriously considering not doing that I would not bet on its future.
Eventually people will have to get new hardware. That's the moment to avoid nVidia, that's how simple this can be.
Also, the problem is nVidia giving shitty Wayland support, not Wayland providing no nVidia support. It's nVidia who has to write the drivers since they themselves opted to keep their implementation details a secret. There's nothing the Wayland people can do except plea, beg and shame. If nVidia then decide not to care, then I say fuck them.
Not supporting Nvidia cards will make Wayland unusable for at least half the Linux desktop users, probably more. Stats I recall range from 50-75%.
"Just buy non-Nvidia" is not, I repeat, a simple option. Lots of people stick with old GPU models because the price/performance ratio has gone out the window and they cannot afford to drop hundreds or thousands on one. Many others have Nvidia in their laptops.
There's nothing preventing Wayland from working with Nvidia except the political insistence that it be open sourced. Which Nvidia is not interested in, never was, and never will be. And it's a red herring to begin with.
TLDR either Wayland bends their stance on open source or their adoption will be severely limited.
OR:
Nvidia will feel enough pressure (likely from the ML / HPC space?) to provide open kernelspace support that they'll actually make that happen.
Which... Has already happened.
Nvidia took a lot of the kernelspace logic that used to be in their proprietary driver, re-architected their GPUs to move that logic into a firmware blob (GSP).
And last year they released a completely Free driver that intefaces with GSP.
This allowed Nouveau developers to finally access critical features like power management (which were basically behind a wall of DRM, as Nvidia used legal and technical measures to lock Nouveau out of their firmware).
Now Nouveau has a new shader compiler, Vulcan support is growing rapidly, and people like me will soon prefer the Mesa stack for Nvidia over Nvidia's own drivers.
And you can bet that Nouveau will work great with all of the Wayland compositors.
This is really the exact wrong point in history to be making the argument you're trying to make 🤣.
Wow you got that backwards. They don't do any of that for the sake of Nouveau or Vulkan or Wayland or whatever. They don't care what people use their open scraps for.
They open up the minimum they can get away with because it's ultimately meaningless — their proprietary stuff is still hidden away and it's not like you can use the parts they open with anything else.
This, btw, applies to AMD and Intel too. The only choice you get with proprietary hardware that you have to use (like GPUs) is whose dick you want to suck. They're not your friend and they won't let community pressure then into decisions.