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Reports: NVIDIA Launching a Distro of Its Own (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: There are unconfirmed reports that NVIDIA is working on its own Linux distribution dubbed "NLINUX." This NLINUX is supposedly a Linux platform optimized for gamers and similar to SteamOS, but NVIDIA has yet to confirm these reports and the sole evidence appears to be a circulating screenshot of an NLINUX install screen. Would you be interested in a Linux distribution created by an IHV? Somewhat similar is Intel's own Linux distribution, Clear Linux, that offers high performance Linux on Intel x86_64 hardware.
It's an edited web page.
Would I be interested in nvidia's version of Linux?
Totally : when winter is cold nothing beats a 350W alim serving a bloated linux with an openGL screensaver to warm my flat.
No, id quite like a steambox though
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
after we had the HTTPS garbage shoved down our throats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw
Thanks for keeping us posted on what you're not interested in.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why not? Are you trolling?
If they'll contribute upstream and make whatever they're doing available to people like SteamOS, Debian, and RedHat, I'm absolutely in favor of this!
Hardware vendors should contribute code liberally to the linux kernel source. If all they're doing is a custom debian variant that they can control package versions on to make their drivers look better than they are, then I'll pass.
If something is coded to be optimised for specific hardware - good on them.
So long as all code, components, drivers etc remain fully open - and are available to the wider linux community I say go for it.
. .
So we have a custom Intel distro to have better Intel support and a custom Nvidia distro to have a better Nvidia support.
What about if I have a system with Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU and I want to get better support for both?
They should focus on their drivers (same with ATI). I'm fine with Ubuntu.
With just that screenshot to go on, my first guess is a GUI-based driver installer, not a full blown distribution.
This could be a boon for them if they are actually willing to open source the driver code for the platform in addition to whatever GPL'd code they are required to post. I'm guessing this OS will be free to use but costly to license if you want a peek at the driver source code. Count me as pleasantly surprised if this distro is fully open.
amirite?
No, this is probably for CUDA work.
I tend to think it's just made up. But even if it isn't then it is more than likely their own in house beta testing version.
Just be grateful it's not FreeBSD which they they could totally embrace and not have to release any code for.
But everyone needs to get it through their heads that the true future of gaming is not OS bound. The need to instead concentrate on visualized GPU infrastructure. Games will run in VM's in a client game OS. More than likely nVidia wants it's own so it's not dependent on Steam as well as allowing them to have their own store and builtin DRM. They are just playing with their own platform.
Microkernel VM, Multiple windows version, SteamOS. nVidia OS, and multiple Linux systems and entire visualized applets.
On an aside I am actually more surprised that VMWare hasn't tried to team up with AMD. AMD could create specialized CPU extensions that speed up Virtualization and before you know it VMWare could supplant Microsoft as the default software loaded on all systems by default. Microsoft might not be happy with $10-30 per computer but I think VMWare would jump at the billion dollar increase in revenue and increased name recognition.
I certainly would be if it could replace the malingering "games-only" Windows partition.
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
lets further splinter a platform with far too many forks and distros and reinvented wheels and fads of the week and abandoned projects and etc etc etc
no wonder the year of linux on the desktop keeps getting postponed.
I haven't been following the desktop development, but NVIDIA has finally been stepping up with their Tegra 210(TX1) development. ARMV8 is awesome. Considerable progress has been made with mainline integration. For the longest time they were stuck on kernel 3.10. I'm glad they finally got it. Once they get the xhci driver merged I think they will be golden, but they have an nasty pinmux in the way complicating things.
Too bad steam for Linux will probably never work on ARMv8.
Nvidia struggle to make a stable driver, who the fuck thinks they can handle maintaining an entire OS. Steambox looks to be a relative disaster and I have far more faith in them being able to do it then Nvidia.
I think it's a fair point. nvidia can do all they want to improve graphics performance, but that's nowhere near enough to warrant a whole new distro, with all that entails. Best case, nvidia will be saddled with keeping their project up to date with non-graphics-related advances from other distros. What's more likely (assuming this turns out to be a non-starter) is that the graphics part will be worked on for a few months and then the entire project will be quietly shelved.
nvidia should just stick to what they know and, given the spirit of FOSS, share it as widely as the lawyers will allow and let everyone deal with what they do best.
Why do I have the strange feeling that if NVIDIA were launching their own distro, the NVIDIA graphics driver wouldn't work on it? ;)
It's a hoax. I modded it down in Firehose and am pissed it made the front page. That screenshot is from some page on NVIDIA's site, with an edited header. This is a non-story, and it should be blatantly obvious by now they have no interest in Linux interop.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Would I be interested in nvidia's version of Linux?
No.
Wouldn't that depend on what it is? Seems a pretty silly move to dismiss something without even knowing anything about it.
Nvidia have a really poor history in even being able to maintain drivers or basic software support, I think it is more than fair for the Answer to be NO. It is up to Nvidia to prove it has capabilities that are better and beyond what it has publicly shown in the past.
Seems a pretty silly move to dismiss something without even knowing anything about it.
If it's good enough for the US Senate, then it's good enough for anybody.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
NVidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. So, NVidia, fuck you!
Seconded. I only visited this thread to post the exact same thing.
Instead of Android, Linux? Just a guess.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
It's fake, find the differences:
http://i.imgur.com/59VWO7a.jpg
https://contests.nvidia.com/share-every-win-need-for-speed
The Real question is why the fuck should anyone be interested with it? They have no history of reliable software let alone reliable OS development practises. Linux already has more forks and distros than you can poke a stick at and the last thing we need is yet another distro struggling to keep up further watering down the resources available to improve things.
Thanks for the great post.........
Maybe not running as such, but there is a fair chance it may lead to better drivers for nvidia hardware.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
You know windows has a command line and powershell, OSX has terminal as well.
As a windows admin I really don't want to lose one of my most useful tools.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Somehow I thought this quote was from Jobs during his first time at Apple Computer inc.? wow. I haven't had a Mac since 2005 and the distortion field is still strong... (source)
More on point, it seems that not only it is true that hardware+OS+applications are a good way to make money, the control over more of these 3 is a good insurance policy against the other vendors closing down app stores or their hardware on you.
I certainly don't mind that NVidia, Steam, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nintendo, Sony and mr Goatse all have separate app stores and compatible hardware to go with them, I just hope that in the future it will be possible to play games and use applications/files across platforms without having to own several consoles and owing monthly rents to each of them.
So Ninnle Linux is real?
Novell? Do you mean SCO-unix of their totally sucky server software? But you are correct; comand line interfaces are NOT the MMI of choice for people with poor memory and a short attention span.
While I think some things have improved with Linux and gaming. Its a long way from being mainstream option for most gamers. Until you start seeing most top title games ported to a Linux system, you won't see a big migration to Linux gaming. NVIDIA to me is steering itself into a dedicated device gaming platform much like a console alternative. I don't think this is to augment the PC gaming industry. To me this only fragments gaming on PC's even more, and maybe the writing is on the wall for Nvidia that PC gaming is dying out.
Of course since I don't want to use the CLI, I must be incompetent or from Gen Z. You would be wrong on both counts since you failed to notice that I mentioned an IBM 5150 which would show my age and not mention that I talked about Novell which hasn't been a main stream NOS for some time now. When you can't discuss someone's opinion then just move to insult them. Is that how you work?
Not that anyone asked but I'd boot it up in a VM and test it out. Not for any good reason but because I've done it to just about every distro out there at one point or another. I might as well do this one too. Why not?
So, yeah... I'll test it out but it's *really* unlikely to become my main distro. Why? Err... As I've said many times, I am not a gamer. The gaming market lost me when they promoted Fallout Tactics as both good and the spiritual descendant of Fallout and Fallout 2. I've not really gamed since then - I was pretty livid and I hold a grudge. Trust is hard built and even harder recovered.
I've wanted to play the new Fallouts. I guess one of them (maybe more) is more an FPS so I didn't play that. I just can't seem to figure out those newfangled joysticks with the extra sticks on 'em. (I'm old.) I did buy a game a few days ago. I've not even installed it. I bought some game called Wasteland something or other. Yeah, I was high at the time.
At any rate, I'm guessing that's what this distro would be geared at and thus it'd be unlikely to be my preference. So, I'm unlikely to turn it into my main distro or even use it as anything other than a VM test to say that I've at least tried it once. I do wonder if it'll be butchered like what Google has done with the Linux kernel or if it'll be easy to drop replacements in, compile one's kernel of choice, and if it will even be a Linux-in-spirit type of thing. I suspect that one will be able to do those things though they might try to make it more difficult than it need be.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Wouldn't that depend on what it is? Seems a pretty silly move to dismiss something without even knowing anything about it.
Given that it is (if I understand TFA correctly) supposed to be Steam-friendly, and be supported by nVidia, there are a couple of assumptions that can be made:
- It will be based on Ubuntu, with gratuitous privilege escalations and more solid security measures that takes a little user understanding all turned off.
- It will rely heavily on WINE and running 32-bit Windows software in an emulator-like environment.
- It will not have LTS. You won't be able to install it on older hardware, and future upgrades might require hardware upgrades.
It might be fine for consumers, but I doubt that any Linux enthusiast will look this way.
Then you can keep your dirty mouth shut when people are complaining about the shitty opensource video drivers and game support for linux. But yeah, I'm not interested in it either, Nvidia lost me as a customer awhile back. I might get bored and spin up a test box, if this every actually comes out. But.... the only proof is an unsourced fucking screenshot. Would anyone be interested in "you're an idiot" distro? Just let me photoshop up a screenshot.
Fallout tactics? That was 15 fucking years ago! No one cares why you can't be bothered to look into ANYTHING else since then. But besides that temper tantrum you put up about your grudge against the gaming industry, the reason "trying this distro out in a VM" won't help you is that (if it exists), it will rely heavily on proprietary drivers and be focused, as you mentioned, on GAMES. How well do you think VMware or vbox will support this kind of acceleration?
Oh, I'd only be testing it for usability, ease of updating, access to repositories, the DE workings, and things like that. Not for gaming. I thought I made that abundantly clear. Maybe not.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
...I've seen some rather insightful comments from you...this isn't one of them. As an analogy, what you're essentially saying is this:
Oh look at this highly specialized and optimized drill tool that turns screws in no time flat! I can screw down these boards in half the time it would take to nail them down. But I have no use for screws, so I'll just turn it around around and see if it still works like a hammer on this line of nails. Oops...would you look at that. That line of nails completely demolished the tool where it doesn't even work on screws anymore. What a piece of crap this thing is.
Heh, no... No it's probably not one of my best. I don't think I articulated it well.
The gist of what I'm saying is that, even though I'm not really a gamer any more, I'd still look at it in a VM. Why? I've tested pretty much all the major distros and minor distros in a VM. I might as well test this one. There's a chance, albeit a small one, that I'll like it. I'd like to see how it works, what it has for weaknesses, how easy it is to configure, and then I can make an informed opinion about it - and I might even be able to speculate as to how other people would see it.
I doubt, very much, that I'd use it to do anything other than test it. But, I'd like to know what it's about so that I can speak from some experience if asked. (Assuming it comes into being.) Rather than make an uninformed opinion about how it's bad, not worth the time, or sucks - I can see for myself what the weaknesses and strengths are and judge accordingly.
The alternative is that I can just wildly speculate that it's awful (or good) and that anyone who disagrees is wrong. If I conclude that then I'd like to be able to give real reasons for it - reasons that are based on actual use. Checking the usability, ability to modify, resource usage under default non-gaming load, desktop environment, and things like that? Those are things I can/could/would do. Then I can actually opine without making shit up and based on personal experiences.
There's also the slim chance that it'd be motivation to get back into gaming. I keep trying, thinking about it, and considering it. I just never get around to doing it again. I was really disappointed with Fallout Tactics but that was more the straw that broke the camel's back than one thing of its own. I was really disappointed but it wasn't just with that one particular game - that one game was the culmination.
Meh, I'm probably still not articulating it well.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Did you actually just post to rant how little you care of the distro, because you turned your back on gaming after a single company betrayed you 15 years ago?
I'd be more interested in a distro maintianed by AMD that would assure me their infinitely more frustrating drivers work without a hitch.
So, without interest in gaming, you'd be testing a Linux distro that is focused on gaming... why?
That's like buying a 2-door sports car and being disappointed that you can't haul a yard of gravel in it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Don't worry. A week after it's released, there will be 20 forks of it with bitter squabbling over which is best.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You know windows has a command line and powershell,
No, he likely doesn't know it--because with Windows, there is never any need for 99.99% of people to ever use it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I think most of your arguments are ill-founded, but I'm not going to touch the bit about VMs. The person you replied to is an idiot, but your arguments against VMs are also pretty stale.
That said: yes, Linux uses shared libraries. Yes, this occasionally causes problems. However, the whole point of having distributions is to have a set of package versions that are known to work together. I don't know that I've ever run into this issue without I was using an out-of-repo package, and if so I would certainly report it as a bug. The use of shared libraries is a tradeoff that allows Linux distributions to be half the size (or less) than a comparable Windows installation. Any nontrivial problem in tech is going to be a tradeoff of some sorts, and this one mostly falls on the maintainers/developers rather than the end users.
However, while you are more likely to encounter this situation on Linux than on Windows, you have more tools to be able to work around it. Setting LD_PRELOAD appropriately can be a useful workaround, or symlinking $bad_version.so to $good_version.so, and if all else fails there are various container-type strategies which let you isolate part of your system and fill it with only the required libraries.
Writing to the system directories for binaries or config is not particularly normal in Linux, and doubly so if you consider /sbin to be more "privileged". Also there's a push towards stateless systems, which means even less screwing with stuff outside the user-writable directories.
people still install to the system directories but its not the right thing to do.
I'm not going to get into the difference between how BSDs and Linux are distributed, which you should know as well as I. Linux uses the Unix Filesystem Heirarchy as well, and I haven't seen any third-party installers which use anything other than /opt or /usr/local/bin.
Linux is the most popular OS on this planet; the Linux kernel runs on more devices than any other. If it continues to not have much desktop marketshare I will be pretty happy, but nothing you've said has much of anything to do with that.
You write and think like an angry teenager. If we ever need a new APK around here we'll know where to look.
Why not write a better file and print manager for Linux?
Windows 10 doesn't need quotes around "evil". It's just fucking capital Evil. You should look into all the bullshit it does, and how little control you have over it.
But go ahead, be a privacy-free botnet node. Revel in it. Post shit that is indistinguishable from shill content. Go right the fuck ahead sir, it's your life.
Someone please mod this up.
When I saw this story on phoronix yesterday, my first thought was "Well, this is phoronix, the rumor mill of linux/foss news; it's to be expected". Michael has been known for posting any unsubstantiated rumor du jour that is circulating the internet at the moment in a blatant click grab.
So I concur -- this is fake until Nvidia provides download URLs for ISOs and source.
It isn't that you aren't articulating things well that is the issue here (regardless of if you are or are not doing so), but rather that what you propose is completely stupid. NVIDIA is a hardware company, and their distribution will clearly be optimized for NVIDA hardware. Using their distribution and then virtualizing away their hardware is like buying a special bra designed to handle DD Breasts and getting breast reduction surgery down to C Cups before trying it out.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The 1990s called, and want your understanding of modern GPU architecture back. Yes. NVIDIA makes Graphics cards which do things like display an image on a monitor. Those cards also also a a whole lot more these days. For example, with CUDA one can leverage the GPU(s) for everything from Bitcoin Mining to Facial Recognition.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Nothing is more sad than the ignorant proudly proclaiming their ignorance and their dedication to holding on to it :-( That is completely untrue. There is often a need, but since the people don't even know it is an option that need goes unfulfilled. For example, if you wanted to remove the Windows 10 related Updates you need to get a tool and run it from the CLI (realistically speaking, as it would take hours or even days to sift through manually), however since most people didn't know how to do that, they lived with the intrusion instead, eventually got sick of seeing the warnings, and accepted the throat-jamming instead of running the CLI Tool.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Wasteland 2 is a pretty good game. It's not really a Fallout game, since the feel is slightly different, and it doesn't share things the SPECIAL system. But it is an isometric post-apocalyptic RPG, and well worth playing. Especially if you already happen to own it.
Eat the rich.
Rather than make an uninformed opinion about how it's bad, not worth the time, or sucks - I can see for myself what the weaknesses and strengths are and judge accordingly.
I think you kind of missed the point of /.
---
Because he's not quite dumb enough to think that "focused on" == "only usable for"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I realize you can afford to get into gaming retail/steam/etc, but with Steam's Family Sharing* I can share my slightly obscene library with you to try out a wide assortment of old and new games if you like. It's all 100% above board and a nice way to legally try before you buy (a friend of mine has a library about double mine and I have tried quite a few games that way on his - saved me from a couple bad purchases :)); you've got my email, just ping me if interested.
:) Also, in the past 15 years, indie games have exploded and the variety of games out there has never been greater (in my experience, I've been PC gaming since the mid-80's)
Games are fun & you seem to occasionally have a little free time on your hands
* Before anyone mentions 'he's not family', it's officially for family and guests and I checked, there's nothing against sharing with friends - in fact, the FAQ specifically mentions sharing with friends, though it is implicitly worded.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I dunno about that, if you want the best graphics performance on Linux the choice is still nvidia.
I may very well take you up on that offer. ;-) I do appreciate it. Speaking of gaming, did you end up getting into KoL? It's addictive... If you do *and* you'd like to, err... Hmm... If you'd like to experience what it's like to have some goodies, I'll be more than happy to find my login and hook you up. I've got millions of meat left (I'm pretty sure) and/or I might have some rather rare things kicking around in my inventory. I've got a whole bunch of stuff, including familiars that are hatchlings (unused so can be transferred) that aren't available any longer, that sort of thing. Well, not by the store one can't buy them. Players sell and auction them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Microsoft's UWP's got everybody spooked. I could see nVidia firing a shoot or two here. Microsoft makes hardware after all. Sure, they'd probably just let Intel do it, or maybe buy somebody like Power VR, but hey, it'd be childs play to kill nVidia. They're pretty much completely dependent on Widows right now outside of a few high end workstations for engineers/mathematicians.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Your generous offer is also appreciated; I played it 2 days & found it quite reminiscent of L.O.R.D. or LOtGD (links more for anyone else reading, I suspect you are familiar with at least the first of those) - moreso the latter (more on that in a moment). I played L.O.R.D. a lot in its heyday. The thrill of playing a multi-player game with friends scattered across town was a new one in 1994 and I was an age (18) when the social aspect really appealed to me. Fast forward 14 years, discovering LOtGD brought back a lot of memories and I even played it semi-regularly (was at a job that had fixed break times [don't miss that!] and it was something I could do in the arbitrarily assigned 'me-time'). Despite this, it wasn't really the same thing (in no insignificant part because I wasn't the same) and after 6 months or so I completely lost interest (my original friends weren't playing, I was older and in a different phase of my life, etc) and though I picked it up one more time a year or so later, I lost interest even quicker this time.
Playing with friends (and/or when I was younger and more social), I think I would really like KoL, but right now with as many things competing for my attention as exist, the only reason Slashdot gets to stay in my routine is I periodically read something that is quite useful to learn. And that's good, too, because I'd really miss it.
I do still game, but I'm more selective in what games I spend time on than I used to be and the only multi-player that appeals to me anymore is playing with my kids. Since I game in Windows, quite a few of my titles are Windows-only, but I do have a lot of multi-platform (Win/Mac/Linux) games, so just let me know if/when you're interested (it's an open invite, anytime).
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Does this finally mean there will be a distro that supports OPTIMUS technology OOTB with proprietary drivers (not nouveau BLEH!) without all the usual black screening, black listing and all the other fucking around that I have to do each time I do a new install of an OS?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is a new store. On android tablets with Nvidia chips they have their own store populated with things that will be compatible. I can certainly see Nvidia doing this on Linux as well as android. I will certainly give it a try as long as it isn't locked down it could be a good base for those of us with Nvidia hardware that want to game.