And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.

Tim Sweeny didn’t make an offer, he tried to make positive PR to EGS while trying to paint Valve as the bad guys; Valve obviously wouldn’t charge the same rate as Epic because they include a lot more value for both user and developers than Epic does: to list a few of Valve services that Epic doesn’t have:

• Steam Workshop (hosting terabytes of content for absolutely free);
• Family sharing;
• Steam Link for game streaming;
• Remote Play Together tech for all the major OSes;
• Linux and Wine/Proton investments (which you could argue was an investment because of the Steam Deck, but that’s an investment that benefits everyone, regardless of whether they own a Steam Deck or not);
• Cloud save hosting;
• Universal controller remapping interface compatible with all the major gamepads;

That’s not to mention the benefits developers can get from Steam’s platform and SDK:

• Steam Input (for not needing to deal with custom implementations);
• Steam Voice API (for in-game voice chats);
• Steam Inventory and Trading Cards, which can result in extra cash for the developers;
• Multiple networking options: Steam Game Servers, Steam Matchmaking & Lobbies, Steam Peer-to-peer Networking, etc.

If you ask me, I think Epic is the one charging way too much

Neverball is a fantastic ball-in-a-maze (Monkey Ball) OSS game

The kernel driver isn’t all you need, you still have to pair it to their closed-source drivers or Nouveau/NVK, which are the device drivers

The driver you’re likely referring to is NVK, which is also not developed by Nvidia, check out the annoucement post by Collabora, it says:

As said above, NVK is a new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa. It’s been written almost entirely from scratch using the new official headers from NVIDIA. We occasionally reference the existing nouveau OpenGL driver […]

And also

a few months ago, NVIDIA released an open-source version of their kernel driver. While this isn’t quite documentation, it does give us something to reference to see how NVIDIA drives their hardware. The code drop from NVIDIA isn’t a good fit for upstream Linux, but it does give us the opportunity to rework the upstream driver situation and do it right.

So they’re developing a driver based off headers made available by Nvidia and some of the reverse engineered code from regular Nouveau. In fact, it seems to be a branch of Nouveau as it stands:

Trying out NVK is no different than any other Mesa driver. Just pull the branch nvk/main branch from the nouveau/mesa project, build it, and give it a try

So the “OSS drivers from Nvidia” aren’t what makes it work, it’s the whole community effort to build NVK from scratch.

Regardless, it only supports the most recent cards using Turing architecture. From mesa3d docs:

NVK currently supports Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs. Eventually, we plan to support as far back as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) GPUs but anything pre-Turing is currently disabled by default.

Judging by the docs at mesa3d, I don’t even have a card that supports it

NVK currently supports Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs. Eventually, we plan to support as far back as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) GPUs but anything pre-Turing is currently disabled by default.

Assuming you’re talking about Nouveau, it’s pretty hit or miss depending on what card you have. My previous laptop had an MX330 and it couldn’t do hardware acceleration stuff and 120Hz via HDMI, not to mention screen sharing on Wayland was wonky.

Oh, and it’s worth to mention that “their” open source driver had nothing to do with Nvidia themselves; they absolute do not care, as opposed to AMD.

FluentReader not only looks pretty good, but also is capable of fetching the text from linked articles, avoiding needing to open a web browser (and also stripping all ads in the process)