Linus Torvalds Discusses the Nvidia Incident

[@Oneiric_Benevolence]

"I'm sorry" Took him 3 milliseconds to realize where he was going lol

[@IncompleteTheory]

Linus always runs with CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT=y

[@dicktrolington416]

@@IncompleteTheory that's a good one

[@Myname-l3h]

@@IncompleteTheoryexplain pls 😅

[@aladdin8623]

Sadly people ignore the context when this incident happened. It was after a female student complaining about nvidia's optimus causing issues in Linux. Nvidia didn't care about those issue reports at that time. So Torvalds expressed his frustration and empathy with small people who own nvidia customer devices. Nvidia's Linux support just recently started to improve somewhat after more requests came up from business customers in the pandemic, crypto mining and now a.i. boom. But it is still nowhere near the quality of the linux foss support from other companies. So it is not the finger anymore but still shame on you nvidia. You are an one trillion dollar company and still fail to produce proper linux drivers.

[@str0680]

small people 💀

[@NADEEMKHAN-sj5hn]

This is the Million dollar comment for Linus Torwald and i like how you understand it and have a good knowledge of empathy skills.

[@Alexbl100]

there's still no official support for optimus. The only thing that works is the optimus-manager, which unofficial. The nvidia driver by default will not make optimus work and you will spend countless hours trying to fix this issue only to end up with more screen tearing.

[@avwie132]

why was it relevant to say that the student was female?

[@Jarikraider]

You have to keep in mind that technically any programmer could potentially be capable of writing an operating system. Obviously Linux is large enough that it deserves attention, but trying to target any operating system that could exist is no small task.

[@Aeduo]

There's a pretty big difference between being awful and insulting to random individual contributors who are legitimately trying to do well, and entities like businesses, and their representatives either doing absolutely nothing at all or bare-minimum work, when they have the means for considerably more and choose not to use it usefully.

[@sisko212]

I don't think so... for my experience, Nvidia on linux still s**k, while Radeon and Intel works flawlessly

[@the-Gammaron]

censoring the word suck? really? The vacuum s**ks The kid is s**king on the lollipop

[@minhajsixbyte]

but a lot of libraries are written on cuda, if you want to write code with those, you got to get an nvidia. its sad monopoly but yeah i wish amd gave a shit about that

[@Kwazzaaap]

@@minhajsixbyte writing and executing cuda is fine, you just have to deal with wild desktop environment bugs, including crashing. Even when your system works fine first try with an nvidia card, one driver update can break it.

[@MadalinIgnisca]

Radeon is decent for basic gaming in Linux and use it as desktop for office and development. AMD sucks big in the server side for GPUs, meaning no AI, no virtualization, nothing. And Nvidia? Guess what, works with the open source drivers, and u can virtualize even consumer GPUs like with Intel XE.

[@ailuros_]

This year, I had to switch to AMD because updating to certain kernel version would break the Nvidia driver. After several weeks, Nvidia comes with the patch.

[@knghtbrd]

Where the companies are still hostile: Cooling systems. They all have advnaced monitoring and control software for Windows. Yet a high level exec at Corsair straight up told me that Linux doesn't matter and neither do people looking for standards in that space. Annoyingly the only USB fan control and temperature monitoring solution for Linux that is supported out of the box is a very expensive Corsair product. A few projects exist, but nothing complete, and nothing that integrates with the tools you'd use for monitoring a server, for example. And Nvidia still deserves to be given the finger.

[@erikkonstas]

And we put this with "things that happened"...

[@javajav3004]

@@erikkonstas You know people exist in the working world as engineers and consultants... Like yeah people lie online but you never know

[@BryonLape]

I'm old enough to remember when NVidia had the best drivers for Linux.

[@ofoofo]

I bought a Steam Deck recently and was amazed. Very compact PC running Linux. With everything beautifully supported, gyro, touchscreen, wifi, bluetooth, screen with adjustable refresh rate, headphone jack, 3D acceleration, perfectly working suspend&resume, etc... What a dream to have a Linux desktop supported out of the box.

[@cybernit3]

Imagine if Linus didn't say F*ck Nvidia!.... it would be worse on Linux with Nvidia gpus.... now we see open source Nvidia drivers.... hopefully they improve them for wayland.

[@bingusbongus1656]

They have very much, especially if you use Fedora you get an amazing and smooth Wayland experience especially with gaming.

[@rorychivers8769]

Jensen Huang will get no more of my money

[@magnomliman8114]

that's effects noting. 4080 super are sold out right now.

[@rorychivers8769]

@@magnomliman8114 It affects me just fine, nvidia is dead to me and I will enjoy my life without it

[@motoryzen]

​@@magnomliman8114Just because an idea's popular doesn't mean it is morally or sane in any level Yes, the world is full of a bunch of idiots and morons blindly. Suck up to or support an evil corporation when they have an alternative choice These are the same morons in the United States of America that think voting, Democrat. Or republican will actually change anything when history has proving the exact opposite depending on the individu. ... One they those same idiots, refused to acknowledge that there is been a third option for many decades.

[@slimjimjimslim5923]

But he said the more you buy the more you save.😂

[@matthew.m.stevick]

Jensen is the GOAT 🐐 💚🖤🇺🇸

[@Evilanious]

Tried it out. It's nowhere close to the first picture that comes up.

[@RiwenX]

it's the most iconic tho

[@bionic_batman]

yeah, it is only the 7th Still not bad though

[@deep.space.12]

5th for me. SEO's working guys!

[@galisma]

2nd for me xd

[@NetDevil]

number 2 AND 3 in my Google search for his name 😂

[@madson-web]

Well, nvidia haven't changed.

[@cynodont7391]

Yeah. Not really. I worked for Nvidia a few years ago and it was obvious to me that Nvidia is not really a hardware company. They sell GPUs of course but the real value of the company is in the software ecosystem (e.g. CUDA, the associated tools and libraries and of course everything related to deep-learning). This is usually high quality software but they really do not want to open it to the public so going open-source is just not possible. I was working from home and I was one of the few employees with full control over my hardware configuration. I was running Linux and, believe it or not, I was using my Intel motherboard for the X11 desktop with a separate NVIDIA GPU for CUDA stuffs.

[@-Engineering01-]

​​@@cynodont7391 you can't software without Hardware, i think the hardware part is more lucrative than software part in the long run, especially for Nvidia.

[@asunavk69]

​@@cynodont7391 Yeah, so basically the reason why they won't work with mesa, is because of their specific stuff like CUDA? I wonder if it'd be possible to integrate the two without affecting their best interests like merging the work from nvk if they succeeded, optimize that and still have CUDA etc closed source. Otherwise there would need to have 2 stacks of their drivers one for mesa and the other just nvidia? I am just speculating here and would like to know why.

[@WeedMIC]

I have no problem with Nvidia on linux personally.

[@srees9874]

Can we say or agree that Linus is probably the biggest technological influencer in the human history

[@JSDudeca]

I have still had issues with Nvidia drivers an will never use them on my main linux desktop. I have a multi-monitor setup and Nvidia is just too flakey.

[@Mallchad]

this is partially Xorgs fault. it doesn't understand multi monitor. it just makes 1 extra large screen space and forces the GPU to render to that. Which is beyond janky

[@magetime29]

Well that's good to know. I guess before I set my multiple monitors back up that I'm switching to team red.

[@JSDudeca]

@@Mallchad With my 3 monitor Linux desktop with ATI GPU, the only issue I have now is that something in the stack forgets the configuration of one or two of the monitors and I get a default 800 x 600 monitor with no ability to change. A hard power bounce (cable pull) of the monitors are required. Because of this, I never turn off my monitors and don't let power management do the same. FWIW, with Nvidia had this issue and several more. Hopefully that changes with their new Open Source drivers.

[@twentylush]

now if only nvidia would use that positive shift to make good linux cmake modules for cudatoolkit

[@Seamusoboyle]

What version of cmake do you use? I had to set up a cmake cuda project the other day, a small project but with some little complications like device-linking, and I could not believe how easy it was vs 5 years ago. CUDA is a supported language within cmake now, so no more FindCUDAToolkit stuff or any of that. There's also commands to import different cuda modules like cublas or cufft, I'm interested in what your use case is if it goes outside of this. There is the problem that a lot of old cmake guides/google results are pre-3.18, where cuda was not an integrated language, but these days it should be a lot easier to use cmake/cuda

[@MelroyvandenBerg]

Nope

[@rambo9199]

Here's hoping he finds a worthy successor or keeps working 10 more years at least..... dude got old man. I hate to think what happens if he leaves and the now obviously compromised foundation takes over.

[@ailuros_]

This year, I had to switch to AMD because updating to certain kernel version would break the Nvidia driver. After several weeks, Nvidia comes with the patch. The drivers are ok for most of the time, but Nvidia is slow to deliver patches even for critical bugs :(

[@bingusbongus1656]

Now, you can get a great gaming and Wayland desktop experience with an RTX 40 series card. My guess, it was Nvidia seeing AMD's dominance in the open-source hardware space which led to companies using AMD GPU hardware in their server spaces and Linux being the top OS for AMD server compatibility.

[@RinaldiMeteoric]

where can I find the whole talk?

[@ellcs4506]

Search for "Linus Torvalds in conversation with Dirk Hohndel at OSS Japan 2023"

[@ryanjohnson4565]

Search for “the whole talk”

[@vanacid2]

nvidia is still a nightmare of closedness. If you are on linux, I wish you don't have an nvidia gpu or your experience will be absolutely horrible. Nothing improved at all.

[@OrchidAlloy]

nvidia works perfectly fine on systems like pop os or garuda linux

[@vikkran401]

I use Fedora on my Gnu/Linux/Systemd/Wayland-KWin/Plasma system and I haven't ran into issues with my GPU yet after running this setup for a couple of months now.

[@renegadeace1735]

Linux hobby installs only worked for me when there was no dedicated GPU.

[@paulsaulpaul]

These days we can rely on certain groups to open source Nvidia drivers and similar things for us.

[@ika_666]

I've literally never had a problem with Nvidia on Linux and I've used it for years

[@cagataykaydr3015]

So Nvidia, love you - Not Linus Torvalds

[@karthikk2719]

shut

[@ArchLars]

He said F you Nvidia then they improved, can he say F you Adobe next? Clearly this works. (this is sarcasm)

[@adamloepker8057]

At least we have AMD graphics chips to count on still

[@Jake-yx8nc]

He's a little close to the hardware for this one.... but if he said "Adobe, fuck you!!" we might actually get a Linux release of Photoshop.

[@zungaloca]

Fk nvidia always

[@kexec.]

all normie who never know how to use terminal complains linus made bad take but no 💀 nvidia still sucks at linux and kernel/driver support is still horrible

[@vamastah1737]

Directly after events with Intel and Meltdown/Spectre issues, Linus apologized (though he had no reason to) and went for a 6-month vacation. When he returned, he became much calmer than he used to be. What do you think about that metamorphosis? Don't you think there could be some pressure applied to him? And why are my comments deleted when I talk about subjects touching both technology and politics?

[@martinxvidxb]

When a person realizes that aggression and hate doesn't yield meaningful and lasting positive results, then they get calmer. Karmic pressure.

[@vamastah1737]

@@martinxvidxb Wishful thinking. Many bad people are not punished, many good people are not rewarded. Torvalds made something useful with potential to capitalize and he himself is influential, so any reason is enough to manipulate him.

[@martinxvidxb]

@@vamastah1737 I don't know about Linus or others. Neither about you. ... will care about myself. Have a nice day :)

[@creativecraving]

I think with Spectre he was probably saddened that he couldn't develop the security fixes for that in the open, which violated his conscience.

[@vamastah1737]

​@@creativecravingyep, it must be hard to accept that you lose kernel performance gain you worked for the last two years with a single patch. To be honest, I would recommend disabling those security patches on personal computers.

[@Fitmoos]

all is guilt of the Linus itself, because not adopt the General Public licence v3 for avoid the Kernel Blobs

[@erikkonstas]

Finish first grade and then we talk again...

[@magnomliman8114]

he realizes that NVidia a trillion dollar company now.

[@TheEvertw]

Great how Linus turns this potentially embarrassing & antagonizing item into praise for NVidia in how their support of the Open Source community has improved. He has learned a thing or two.

[@setoman1]

That picture should be on his Wikipedia article. Sums up his entire character.

[@terryscott524]

nvidias linux drivers are kinda fire now ong like im not cappin

[@drobotk]

unless you wanna use linux on a amd+nvidia laptop with an external monitor; then god help you (im sad)

[@dissident1337]

or unless you use Wayland

[@TerracideDK]

I find Nvidia hardware useful, Torvald....not at all /shrugs. (It THIS the year of Linux?)

[@Martinit0]

Elon Musk is now carrying that torch.

[@chrisbradley3224]

Elon couldn't carry Linus's jock strap.

[@12kenbutsuri]

Did you just compare dumb Elon with Linus!?

[@Millez]

Yes the richest guy on the planet is for sure sticking up for the public against big corporations. What are you talking about.

[@Izuel13]

@@12kenbutsuri Not fair

[@444haluk]

In terms of opposing the evil cooperations.

[@PEGuyMadison]

For a guy that copied code from Minux in the 90's for Linux he sure has developed an attitude.... I wonder if he has ever given credit to Andrew Tanenbaum.

[@defos8692c]

Even Tanenbaum calls those allegations bullshit

[@tacokoneko]

it is BS, the original code of Linux was copied from NOWHERE and nowadays, TONS of projects all copy Linux, and many of them don't comply with GPL

[@avishevin1976]

Do you enjoy proving your life has no value?