He just responded to a complaint that nVidia hardware wasn't working with "nVidia is the worst company we've dealt with". I don't think that's "out of touch", it's pretty much the kind of stuff his job description entails. If you don't like his style, fair enough, but if the leader of a project says "company X is the worst company we deal with" then that doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence.
AFAIK the debate was mostly settled by NVIDIA submitting their own EGLStreams backend for Wayland (that promptly exposed a bunch of Wayland bugs). So difficult to work with, that NVIDIA, asking to do something different and then submitting their own code to implement it!
AFAIK it also ended up being literally a couple thousand lines of code, not some massive endeavor, so the Wayland guys don’t come off looking real great, looks like they have their own Not Invented Here syndrome and certainly a lot of generalized hostility towards NVIDIA. Like Torvalds, I'll be blunt, my experience is that a lot of people just know NVIDIA is evil because of these dozens of little scandals they’ve drummed up, and they almost all fall apart when you look into them, but people just fall back on asserting that NVIDIA must be up to something because of these 27 other things (that also fall apart when you poke them a bit). It is super trendy to hate on NVIDIA in the same way it’s super trendy to hate on Apple or Intel.
Example: everyone used to bitch and moan about G-Sync, the biggest innovation in gaming in 10 years. Oh, it's this proprietary standard, it's using a proprietary module, why are they doing this, why don't they support the Adaptive Sync standard? Well, at the time they started doing it, Adaptive Sync was a draft standard for power-saving in laptops that had languished for years, there was no impetus to push the standard through, there were no monitors that supported it, and no real push to implement monitors either. Why take 10 years to get things through a standards group when you can just take a FPGA and do it yourself? And once you've done all that engineering work, are you going to give it away for free? Back in 2016 I outright said that sooner or later NVIDIA would have to support Adaptive Sync or else lose the home theater market/etc as consoles gained support. People told me I was loony, "NVIDIA'S just not that kind of company", etc. Well, turns out they were that kind of company, weren't they? Turns out people were mostly mad that... NVIDIA didn't immediately give all their engineering work away for free.
The GPP is the only thing I’ve seen that really stank and they backed off that when they saw the reaction. Other than that they are mostly guilty of... using a software license you don’t like. It says a lot about the success of copyleft that anyone developing software with a proprietary license is automatically suspect.
The truth is that NVIDIA, while proprietary, does a huge amount of really great engineering in novel areas that HNers would really applaud if it were any other company. Going and making your own monitor from scratch with a FPGA so you can implement a game-changing technology is exactly the kind of go-getter attitude that this site is supposed to embody.
Variable refresh rate/GSync is a game changer. DLSS 2.0 is a game changer. Raytracing is a game changer. And you have NVIDIA to thank for all of those, "proprietary" and all. They would not exist today without NVIDIA, AMD or Intel would not have independently pushed to develop those, even though they do have open-source drivers. What a conundrum.
I'm not sure if Linus was talking about the Wayland stuff specifically; the answer was in response to a complaint that the nvidia/Intel graphics card switching didn't work on Linux.
I haven't used nvidia products for about 10 years and I'
m not really in to gaming or graphics, so I don't really have an opinion on them either way, either business or technical. I used their FreeBSD drivers back in the day and was pretty happy it allowed me to play Unreal Tournament on my FreeBSD machine :-)
Linus is not always right, but a lot of what he says is often considerably more nuanced and balanced than his "worst-of" highlight reel suggests. There are plenty of examples of that in the presentation/Q&A he did from which this excerpt comes, for example (but of course, most people only see the "fuck you" part).
So if Linus – the person responsible for writing operating systems with their hardware – says they're the "worst company we deal with" then this strikes me as a good reason to at least do your research if you plan to buy hardware from them, if you intend to use it with Linux anyway. I'll take your word for it that they're doing great stuff, but if it outright refuses to work on my Linux box then that's kinda useless to me.
This was also 6 or 7 years ago I think, so perhaps things are better now too.
Thank you for this comment. I learned quite a bit! As an investor it makes sense to go with a company that takes the profit for a renovation for a while.
