[sametmax]

Imagine a world where Gnome doesn't support any proprietary card drivers, where VLC can't read non open codecs, where libre office can't open doc* files...

Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?

[boudin]

The issue isn't as much of proprietary drivers as nvidia not wanting to implement GBM in their drivers as it's supposed to for wayland support and pushing for EGL streams.

It means that people writing wayland compositors have to write a EGL stream version because of a purely one-sided nvidia decision.

EGL Stream support in Mutter (gnome) is supported a bit by Nvidia but that's it.

Between spending time on improving a compositor and the window managers making use of it or spending time to support non standard driver implementation because of one-sided decision from nvidia, it seems to me that the first choice is a smarter one.

[sametmax]

Do you know how much special cases there are in all FOSS to accomodate the bad decisions of the rest of the world ?

Just look at the ifdef in the Python source code to make it cross plateform, it's insane.

But it's what's makes it useful.

You can have purity. But you won't have many users, because on the scale "Stallman <=> My dad", they will all be on the far left.

Nothing wrong with that. But it won't be a big number.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

    if (nvidia) {
        // thousands of lines of code
    } else {
        // thousands of lines of code
    }

I refuse to add this to my code. The nouveau driver is good enough for most people who aren't buying new cards, and if you're buying a new card you should give your money to a company that cares about FOSS.

[Filligree]

As much as I'd love to do that, I need CuDNN for my work. It's okay, though; X11 still works. I have no real reason to want Wayland.

[pjmlp]

The beauty of choice is that it goes both ways.

[roenxi]

Yep. Particularly with hardware makers that strategy has worked remarkably well. Nvidia is actually the only major hardware company I know of (other than Apple who sorta don't count) who doesn't have a good open source driver. That isn't an ideological position, just all the other majors seem to support linux as a first class citizen across all product categories.

There is also a difference between data exchange (codecs, doc*, etc) and drivers. Intransigence by the kernel community regarding closed source code has resulted in Good Things in the driver space.

[sametmax]

Yet, it seems that the only very popular FOSS projects are the ones playing well with proprietary. Actually the most popular distrib is Ubuntu, precisely because of this.

[loa-in-backup]

This comment is tautologic

[imtringued]

What about ARM GPUs or PowerVR?

[monocasa]

PowerVR is basically dead FWIW.

[arghwhat]

That would work just fine. Intel HD, which basically everyone has, would work fine (and performs quite well). AMD also works.

It's only nVidia that would be excluded, due to them acting like children and trying to push proprietary things as the only GPU vendor.

[pjmlp]

Haven't you seen how largely successful Linux desktops are among common users, outside the ChromeOS and Android variants?

[sametmax]

My point, actually.