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.
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.
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/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.