Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by izacus 3480 days ago
And part of that is because Linux nVidia drivers are on-par quality wise with Windows. Because it's the same codebase and they develop it lockstep.

AMD it seems won't be able to do that now.

2 comments

> AMD it seems won't be able to do that now.

Yes they can, they'll just have to commit resources to keeping up with kernel changes instead of having it done for them upstream. You can't have your cake and eat it as well.

nVidia has it. All they did is close off the drivers completely and not listen to kernel devs. Seems to be working out for them very well.

Is that the lesson we want to give to companies?

If you want the kernel devs to maintain your code, it has to be maintainable. If not, you have to fix it yourself every time the kernel changes. That's the cost NVIDIA pays for their abomination.
They can still do it. If they don't have resources for further development, then just ship it out of kernel as a separate patch/driver for now. That way it will still be open source and will be included in Ubuntu, Archlinux, etc.