Hey guys, I’m just an ordinary dev looking for something to work on. While messing around with my hobby projects, I couldn’t help but notice that under the surface, there are a lot of places that the libre desktop can be improved. I’d like to take on your suggestions on what I should seriously consider working on and helping out with.
Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
(For those wondering, I’m still working on my other stuff.)
Yea, sadly, Linux can do nothing to support Nvidia better since they don’t support the community with opensource driver and actively add DRM do make our lives harder. It’s just sad. Right now, I try to get my MacBook pro 5,5 with deticated Nvidia GeForce 9600m GT to work with openSuse I tested and failed with tumbleweed twice now and I’ll try leap next.
Why does it need to be the open source version?
Because Nvidia refuses to offer up to date driver (compatible with mainline kernel) for legacy cards like in my mac and I refuse to throw away a fully working computing machine. I would not mind if they stopped supporting but provide the community with the source and I would not mind if they would still update their proprietary drivers for legacy cards. Now my situation is ether use the reverse engineered driver, which seems like a time bomb that kills my install (based on my experience) or I use the outdated legacy driver patched by the community, which seems not to work on 6.6.6. next I try a LTS kernel version.
So tldr: if Nvidia would open the source of the legacy driver, they would make the live of many people more easy and they would actively work on minimizing eWaste which would be a win for sustainability. I don’t need more horsepower, my MacBook 5,5 is strong enough, all it needs is software.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst
NVK is changing things for the better on NVIDIA. I tested it out the other day on my RTX3070 laptop and a lot of games are already playable. Performance has a ways to go to match the proprietary driver but it’s incredibly refreshing to see modern games running playably on an open source driver stack on an NVIDIA GPU.
This is actually… Completely wrong. Open sourcing video drivers are getting really good a and, in a few years, they’ll be probably just as good, if not better than the proprietary ones.