Slashdot Mirror
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.
You do understand, don't you, that nVidia has never provided OSS drivers for Linux? Their Linux drivers are nothing more than binary blobs that you can only install by booting into a CLI, then rebooting after the installation is complete.
About 10 or 12 years ago I had a Dell laptop that had Nvidia graphics. I was running Gentoo Linux. I reported some bug with the Nvidia driver. Within hours late Saturday, early Sunday I got a reply from Nvidia with a patch to the MM kernel that fixed the problem. The bug was not in the Nvidia driver but was caused by recent change in the MM kernel. I was very impressed. In this case they were acting like an FOSS shop not a proprietary software shop.
I grant you the closed portions of the Nvidia drivers can be a royal pain in the neck, especially when combined with the closed Flash player. There were times when it was maddening but that was partly driven by an obsession by some Gentoo devs to be overly zealous with purging versions of the Nvidia driver from the portage system. Things have been mostly stable for a good number of years now.
I appreciate the Linux support Nvidia does provide. For example, I've been using VDPAU which does video decoding on the graphics card which let me play blu-rays on a machine with a not so powerful CPU. Also, I've never had to reboot in order to update the Nvidia driver. I do have to rmmod the old driver after I stop X but that's no biggie. YMMVG
I am interested in seeing the Nvidia distro if they release one but I'm not holding my breath.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
That is amusing I had a similar issue about 10 years ago with the Linux driver and one of their new cards. I reported the details of the bug, how to recreate it etc. What I got back was basically an insult of bad luck we don't really offer any support, "either take what is to offer or go with one of the competitors (HaHa)", The HaHa part was actually part of the response as at the time no one came close to matching Nvidia performance so there was no real option.
A few months later AMD came out with some competitive offerings I immediately went about removing Nvidia from all future orders we made for our enterprise for both windows and Linux and of course any personal purchases even when it meant I got less performance. The total disregard for a loyal customer at the time was more than I could stomach or forgive and I have not purchased a single Nvidia based system where I had any say in the specs since. I like to think I have cost them a pretty penny, or at least the prick that responded to me at the time has cost them a pretty penny, realistically it probably no more than 100k desktops but still I like to think that that is 100k desktops of revenue AMD has that they don't.