Many people here are now praising NVIDIA given its massive jump in valuation attributed to its role in the new AI revolution. They are painting a picture of a company who invented CUDA, and opened the world to GPU processing, enabling AI worldwide today. But please, let's not forget the countless people of the Open Source communities who pressured and fought so that NVIDIA would support linux with their closed drivers - so that today linux servers could run the AI revolution, and massively inflate the company valuation... Still today, if you ask anyone who has ever tried to install a NVIDIA graphics card to a linux machine (either for using CUDA, or for displaying graphics), you will hear mostly pain and frustration. Note: this article is from 2012, and not new by any means
Kevin Foad
11 meses
A long time ago, when I was still a hands-on developer, I evaluated a Linux platform for a new product. I had some pretty old components, and there were 'drivers' available. Never got any other of them working. Or if they did, even my most basic code didn't return the required capabilities I KNEW were on the hardware. Installed Windows, it sprang into life. We swallowed the cost of a license for our product. I'm sure things ARE better now - but the very model of open source and closed private companies, and being at the mercy of either them releasing information or providing drivers still haunts me. I hope I am wrong (I like being proven wrong!) I can see the advantages of the Big Box company and of a Community-based code base, or Semi-Commercial model - but you HAVE to ensure your customer base is supported. Or reassure them that they ARE on the roadmap... and quickly. While that is an old article, I wonder if business ties to Microsoft mean even the mighty NVIDIA can't (or isn't allowed to) effectively track Linux with Microsoft compatibility?
Michael K.
11 meses
It's painful, but not terrible.
Software Engineer at Serato
12 mesesThings have come a long way since the bad old days of Nvidia basically refusing to work with Linux. It's now quite easy to get up-to-date drivers for modern Nvidia hardware on multiple Linux distros. Granted, the driver releases are generally still delayed (often by a year or more), but they do get consistently released now. My experience with Linux has been that progress is slow yet consistent. Because of this, Linux has now caught up to Windows & Mac in many areas (with the main exception being application support), and the strenghts of that OS will never be truly emulated by its competitors because of the fundamental differences in their business values. That's one of the reasons why I've predicted that the popularity of Windows could start to decline soon (in favour of Linux).