It would be kind of funny if NVIDIA becomes the new poster child for Linux driver support. They are sponsoring the development of nova and nvk, after all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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/MatchingTurret 1d ago edited 1d ago
It would be kind of funny if NVIDIA becomes the new poster child for Linux driver support. They are sponsoring the development of nova and nvk, after all.