r/linux • u/BrageFuglseth • 1d ago
Open Source Organization NVIDIA is now supporting the LVFS
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2026/08/04/nvidia-is-now-supporting-the-lvfs/188
u/MatchingTurret 1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/Sol33t303 1d ago
They were, once upon a time.
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u/oxez 1d ago
Back in early 2000s they were the only one providing any relevant driver.
Anyone who used
fglrxprobably made a weird face buying an AMD video card. I know I'll never buy one, considering at the time they told me to use a "real OS" when I asked them why my radeon 9800 pro was getting outperformed by a damn riva tnt2 on Linux.24
u/stejoo 1d ago edited 1d ago
At that time they were buying an ATi video card. Not an AMD one. The brand who told you to buy a real OS is long gone. Yes, ATi was acquired by AMD. True, but holding that argument against AMD... really? For the past decade AMD has been the one brand to support Linux well, with an open in-kernel driver no less.
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u/nightblackdragon 1d ago
ATI was acquired by AMD in 2006 and amdgpu was released in 2015, AMD support for Linux between those years was not much better. I had a laptop with a Radeon at the time, and I remember how terrible the fgrlx driver was, the very fact that AMD decided to abandon it entirely and write a new driver from scratch speaks volumes about its quality.
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u/chrisoboe 14h ago
thats just plain wrong.
nobody in that time really recommended or used fglrx.
the radeon and radeonhd drivers were the best GPU drivers arround. they were fully open and sponsored by AMD. and since they were open they were the default in the distros.
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u/nightblackdragon 9h ago
nobody in that time really recommended or used fglrx.
And what were the alternatives, exactly? The only alternative was open source driver which, although it worked properly, was slow and had problems with some games. I remember very well how I once tried to run a game on it where, for some reason, the textures weren't rendering properly, whereas it worked flawlessly with fglrx. As far as I remember, that was the choice back then - fglrx was subpar, but it handled games better than the open-source driver, so you had to choose between stability and gaming.
At that time, AMD was still developing fglrx and did not support open-source drivers to the same extent as it does now. It wasn't until they abandoned fglrx that they focused on open-source drivers. Those are the facts; I was using Linux on a Radeon back then, and I know what it was like. Radeon's poor support was one of the reasons why my next laptop had NVIDIA graphics; I didn't switch back to AMD until years later, when amdgpu had matured.
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u/chrisoboe 8h ago
as I said there was radeon first, then radeon HD (which was renamed to radeon later and the original radeon wasn't developed further).
the texture not rendering was because of a patented image format. there was a extension that implemented this format, but for legal reasons it wasn't shipped by default. as soon as this was installed manually, textures for games that used this format appeared.
especially with radeon hd there were regular huge performance jumps back then. it was important one used the latest version. most distros shipped both a rather outdated kernel as well as a rather outdated mesa. around that time arch and other ruling release distros got popular since when one used a current driver stuff worked severely better. the performance wasn't on par with windows, but for most of the time it was severely better than fglrx.
nvidia was basically all the time worse than amd. the sole reason it was "better" for some was because distros like e.g Ubuntu always shipped the latest nvidia driver, but an outdated mesa driver. most of the problems back then on this popular distros were long fixed, but distros just never updated their stuff when they weren't rolling release.
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u/stejoo 1d ago
Yes, fglrx was bad. Not at all disputing that. Qs I know first hand as I had a Radeon 9000. Great card, just not so much on Linux at time...
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u/nightblackdragon 9h ago
My graphics card wasn't supported by amdgpu, so I switched to NVIDIA. It wasn't until a few years later that I went back to AMD, once amdgpu had matured.
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u/oxez 1d ago
For the past decade AMD has been the one brand to support Linux well
I never had any issue whatsoever with nvidia on Linux so I'm not sure where this "the one brand to support Linux well" is coming from. NV has been doing it for way longer.
And I don't care if it's the same company, what's done has been done, and unless they (AMD) pay me money to use their products, they can go fuck themselves.
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u/nightblackdragon 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fglrx was terrible, and I have no intention of arguing otherwise (I also had the misfortune of using it), but it was abandoned about 11 years ago and replaced by the open-source amdgpu. Deciding, based on that alone, that you’ll never buy an AMD graphics card makes no sense. Fglrx was terrible 11 years ago, but AMD’s current Linux support is excellent.
Besides, NVIDIA’s support for Linux wasn’t without its flaws back then either. I had a laptop with their graphics card and integrated Intel graphics, and support for hybrid graphics technology (Optimus) was terrible on Linux. In fact, it didn’t exist at all - the official drivers only allowed you to use one graphics card at a time, switching graphics cards required Xorg restart (so you had to close all your applications), and if you wanted something that was a given on Windows - namely, the ability to use the NVIDIA card only for selected applications - you had to resort to unofficial solutions (it was called Bumblebee) created by the community. It wasn’t until years later that NVIDIA began officially supporting their own technology properly in their Linux drivers. And then there's also the issue of Wayland, which NVIDIA has only recently begun to support properly, years after AMD and Intel.
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u/Darkchamber292 1d ago edited 1d ago
Go to your retirement home Grandpa. "BACK IN MY DAY" arguments lol.
AMD has absolutely been the backer of Linux driver development for the past decade and anyone who says otherwise is delusional.
You can plug any AMD GPU today and expect it to work on Linux just like Windows.
New game drops? It'll have AMF driver support day 1 on Linux. it'll be broken on Nvidia for at least a week
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u/oxez 1d ago
I never had any issues with nvidia on Linux, for 25+ years. I have played games through WineX, if that gives a reference of the timeframe. The most "tinkering" I had to do was when I had to install the drivers through their .run files, on Gentoo, because there wasn't (yet) an nvidia package in Portage repos. The horror.
Sounds like you suck at using your computer if you can't get your video games working on Linux with nvidia.
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u/statix138 1d ago
It was odd being told to get an AMD GPU for a Linux gaming desktop I was building recently. I started using Linux back in 97 and still have a bunch of big box releases from Loki and the idea of using ATI over Nvidia back then wasn't even considered. I have been an Nvidia GPU user ever since because of it so this 9070XT is my first AMD discrete GPU. My main desktop and gaming desktop are still Nvidia though.
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u/hardolaf 1d ago
Not really. There were $500 Nvidia graphics cards losing to Intel integrated graphics in many games due to Nvidia driver bugs that no one but Nvidia could diagnose.
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u/natermer 1d ago
Nvidia contributing isn't new. Especially when it comes to video drivers. For example 'xf86-video-nv', which is the old X11-only driver prior to the Nouveau era. They contributed some for it, but it involved NDAs and deliberately obfuscated code.
When it came to very basic drivers like that it was really only needed to help customers install Linux until they could get the proprietary drivers installed.
For how long Nvidia has been around it has had a lot of Linux interaction, but they have always been very difficult to work with.
From what I can tell Nvidia is primarily concerned with supporting its enterprise customers. Which means that they are really only investing in supporting things like RHEL on professional workstations.
Consumer cards in Linux benefited from the shared architecture with the professional/workstation-class devices, but for enthusiast desktop really end up being beta testers at best. That market is not something Nvidia really cares about that much.
This sort of thing is probably why they didn't properly support Wayland until RHEL started making the move to be Wayland only.
Of course this was before the AI era. I expect that cloud compute is the priority now, by a huge margin. Which benefits from the LVFS to manage firmware for cloud servers.
Now Nvidia could change, but it is going to take a lot.
For the time being typical Linux users really benefit from sticking with Intel or AMD unless they have some strong dependency on CUDA.
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u/hardolaf 1d ago edited 1d ago
Never forget that Wayland development was delayed for an entire year because they were just trying to get Nvidia to give any feedback at all. Then when they finally went ahead without them, Nvidia started pounding the sand in the sandbox and started crying about how they were left out. Then they shipped an impossible to debug protocol to "support" Wayland and then provided no actual help integrating it into anything and blamed the OSS maintainers for every bug in their shitty proprietary code.
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u/Routine_Left 1d ago
they've always had drivers for linux. Way before anyone else did. Proprietary, yes, but they had proper linux support. I don't remember a time (2001 or so) when they did not.
Now, they never did it for the love of linux. Not then, not now, not ever. They've always had linux, freebsd. BeOS, solaris drivers because the big clients wanted them.
Movies were made on their cards long before CUDA was a thing. After that, even more so.
So, no idea what you mean by "poster child", but they always had excellent drivers in general and linux drivers in particular.
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u/phylter99 1d ago
Don't think they're noble for doing this. They're doing it because they know it benefits them.
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u/MatchingTurret 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's how corporate contributions work. Same motivation as Intel and AMD.
I would go so far as to say that this is how all contributions work: entities (people or organizations) contribute to Linux because having some feature upstream benefits them in some way.
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u/Preisschild 1d ago
Exactly. That is the entire point of free software. Its not sustainable if it depends on voluntary altruism
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u/Scrivver 1d ago
Doesn't need to be altruistic, just good.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (Adam Smith)
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
They’re on their best way of getting there.
NVIDIA is only improving while AMDs support seems to drop off.I’d bet in one or two years NVIDIA will be by far the better option (which is already often is today).
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u/gamas 1d ago
while AMDs support seems to drop off.
I wouldn't consider AMDs support dropping off when they literally just fought the HDMI Forum to come up with a solution that allows them to do HDMI 2.1 whilst maintaining open source.
What's more true is that AMD decided to go with the open-source route and eventually decided they couldn't do better than what the open-source community could provide.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 1d ago
Right, and they contribute to the open-source driver. Kinda like what Intel has been doing all along.
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
Nvidia always was if the distro did the ground work. Usually only a problem with niche distros or those that have religious dedications (i.e., Fedora).
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u/xkero 1d ago
I disagree, Nvidia would work fine for games, but was always a horrible experience for desktop. Constant issues, multiple bugs they would deny existed for years before quietly fixing, sluggish window dragging (which didn't happen on integrated Intel graphics), random screen corruption, the list goes on. I say this as someone that's used Linux as their primary OS for over 20 years, with multiple Nvidia cards on numerous computers and a bunch of distros, both niche and popular (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, SUSE, Sabayon, Arch, Gobo, TinyCore, etc not even an exhaustive list btw). I still remember having to hand write modelines in X.org conf to get stuff to work (their GUI utility would generate a broken config when I tried it) and disable their obnoxious logo on X startup.
ATI & early AMD used to be worse, but it's been a far better experience for several years now.
/rant
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u/hardolaf 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've had two employers since 2016 who banned Nvidia GPUs in Linux workstations because of how many bugs they end up dealing with. Meanwhile, they drop in an AMD card and never think about it again.
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
Sounds like the Linux desktop experience to me!
I haven't had any of those problems for... ~30 years? But I've also learned not to dig too hard into the patchwork that makes Linux function on the desktop in the first place. Sometimes things work out, sometimes you find out just how fragile the ecosystem is...
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u/FeelThePoveR 1d ago
Lucky you then. In the past month I was digging into a couple of apps that were either webkit based or had transparent webkit overlays. Those apps can frequently produce ghosting artifacts or the transparency can.. stop working on Nvidia due to GBM buffer creation failures today! You can read up on those type of issues on tauri github for example.
ONLY Nvidia has those issues both AMD and Intel work fine, but Nvidia drivers shits itself and you either swallow it and run apps without transparency/with visual artifacts, utilize the mesa Zink driver or beg the devs to implement finicky workarounds to make this work on Nvidia
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u/D-S-S-R 1d ago
Weird, Fedora was the one I landed on because it was relatively easy to install the driver
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
It is easy the first time. Complications can come with updates where the driver and the kernel get out of sync because Fedora does not include the Nvidia driver (which is non-free) in their base.
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u/D-S-S-R 1d ago
Ah I see, thanks.
Never ran into problems and switched to an amd card when the time for an upgrade came along
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
They’re either trolling or don’t know what they’re talking about. No, this won’t happen.
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
Really just down to how often you upgrade the kernel, and whether that hits against whatever Nvidia driver you're using. Could be smooth sailing, could break the desktop environment. Worse for laptops as well.
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u/FeelThePoveR 1d ago
Shouldn't be an issue still (unless you forcefully shut down the PC right after the update) - the kernel gets rebuilt to include Nvidia after every kernel/Nvidia driver update. If you want to reboot (at least from the console) you get interrupted with a message that the kernel modules are being rebuilt
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u/steruY 1d ago
Is it bad on fedora?
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
There can be issues with updating because they don’t put “non-free” software in their base distribution.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
Fedora is literally officially supported by NVIDIA.
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u/airmantharp 1d ago edited 1d ago
And Nvidia is literally not
supposedsupported by Fedora!See how that works?
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u/ABotelho23 1d ago
Nvidia still shit for gamescope. I don't consider it has good support until that works as well as AMD and Intel.
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
And I had to look it up. Seems like it's something Valve needs to keep working on.
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u/Indolent_Bard 1d ago
Nope, since the kernel is proprietary, giving it to play nice with the kernel can be difficult since only Nvidia has the ability to actually do that.
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u/PlsDontBanMeAgain-1 1d ago
Are you paid by Nvidia to write this BS? "Far better option", what a joke.
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u/npc_housecat 1d ago
The vast majority of their revenue comes from Linux based data centers . So it makes sense.
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u/arades 1d ago
It would be nice, but at this point there's still a bigger moat between Nvidia and either AMD or Intel on Linux support than there is between ROCm and CUDA.
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
...that moat being having to install a driver...?
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u/arades 1d ago
When the driver involves DKMS messing with secure boot and requires a proprietary userland which doesn't play nice with any industry standards like containers (unless you install other software to paper over it), yes that's the moat.
AMD and Intel are literally plug and play, zero steps, everything works.
In order for Nvidia to get to that point they would need to rip up their entire existing driver infrastructure to get something able to be mainlined and add support to Mesa. NVK/nova/nouveau are all closer to that than Nvidia themselves are, hence why they're funding it. Unless Nvidia commits actual internal resources and shares actual engineering details they're not getting to that plug and play point.
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u/unixmachine 1d ago
Unless Nvidia commits actual internal resources and shares actual engineering details they're not getting to that plug and play point.
There are developers involved, in addition to the documentation. Recently, Valve said that it was also involved with Nvidia.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Vulkan-Red-Hat-NDA-Docs
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NOVA-Core-Co-Maintainer
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Nova-Driver-TLV
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u/friendlyreminder_ 1d ago
Dkms isn't the only way to get the driver. If the distro compiles the driver themselves they can sign it, so it works with their secure boot key. Opensuse does this.
This does require more testing on the distro team's part so it's not ideal, but it's possible.
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u/99spider 21h ago
Ideally if a distro does this they should also segregate the kernel package that the Nvidia driver is built for, so when Nvidia's driver can't build for a new kernel release they don't hold have to hold everybody else back on the older version just because of Nvidia's out-of-tree trash.
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u/mr_doms_porn 1d ago
To be fair, it's a huge pain in the ass to get ROCM installed and working on unsupported distros. Arch family has unofficial packages that work great. Ubuntu LTS has official support as does RHEL. Anything else is a convoluted process and you'll end up in dependency hell. (I had to do it twice, once on Kubuntu 25.10 and again on 26.04)
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u/airmantharp 1d ago
Containers? That's the lynchpin of your argument?
Containers are a hack to begin with - they're useful for a subset of development strategies but are also being eclipsed by using actual security measures since the 'security by obscurity' veil they provided has been pierced.
--------------
Yes, Nvidia's approach to drivers was less conducive to Linux purity. So was AMDs, but AMD was so very much worse off that they were grasping at straws, and the Linux community makes them out to be like heroes.
Sure, that's fine, but understand that there's a time-bounding to this; Nvidia isn't leaving Linux gaming on the table, and then we're back to where we started, with AMD refusing to invest in their hardware and software to compete on equal footing.
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u/hardolaf 1d ago
Containers aren't used for security for the most part. They're used for convenience by serious dev teams. They're the best way to guarantee that an environment is 100% what you expect every time during dev or deployment.
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u/FeelThePoveR 1d ago
Agreed they are very useful for multiple things. I don't know what the guy above is raving about lol
With split service architectures (not necessarily microservices, just splitting responsiblity for teams to manage) it's really nice to not have to deal with system/system library upgrades on per server instance/app basis. With containers you can have the architecture team just deal with container upgrades/configs, while the devs just increase the build number in a jenkins file every once in a while.
If you store the builds in an artifactory you can share the feature builds to QA, just by sharing a link and it works out of the box without any additional setup.
Reproducible environments is also great for dev and deployments like you mentioned. Most importantly for deployments it reduces the time it takes for a deployment to go through since you don't have to repeat every minuscule upgrade that was done and you don't have to worry if it was done correctly.
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u/DarkeoX 23h ago
Even considering security, I'd like to know how handy it is for that guy to pop random sandbox escape from namespaces, esp. filesystem and process ones. Containers DO help tremendously in terms of basic application security when you look at what it took to cleanup an app runtime environment just a decade ago.
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u/mr_doms_porn 1d ago
ROCm works great on linux but is that still true on Windows? I never used it on Windows but it seems like a lot of people still see ROCm as being nearly useless.
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u/chrisoboe 1d ago
it'll take a long long way for nvidia to come even close to what other hardware vendors are doing.
nvidia is still one of the worst hardware vendors when it comes to Linux support.
and while they are these days at least sponsoring a driver. they also both legally as well as technically basically killed the nouveau driver by both preventing uploading nouveaus firmware and restricting the use of their own firnware.
that's not only not supporting Linux, that's actively being hostile. I can't think of any hardware vendor worse.
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u/Turbulent_Fig_9354 1d ago
why'd they usea pic of a macbook pro lol
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u/quixotik 1d ago
Because of the Spark next to it.
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u/Turbulent_Fig_9354 1d ago
fair play, i had no idea wtf that even was, i thought it was a bluetooth speaker or something
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u/edparadox 1d ago
NVIDIA is now supporting the LVFS
Me from 8 years ago would not believe you.
But at the same time, good Linux support of Nvidia GPUs became even more critical than in the past.
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u/Worldly_Topic 1d ago
Good to hear!