Linus Has Some Choice Words for NVIDIA

[Rob Williams]

By now, it should come as a surprise to no one that Linus Torvalds is an outspoken character. If you ever wind up in his crosshair while he's upset, the result isn't going to be pleasant. We've seen him tear apart projects he's had a beef with in the past, such as GNOME, KDE and even openSUSE - so who's next? As the title suggests, NVIDIA - thanks to its lack of Optimus support for Linux. This came out during a Q&A session hosted by the Aalto Center of Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[madmat]

What's the saturation of Linux on PC's in the OS market? Under 2%? Out of that what's the percentage of laptops versus desktops? 50/50? 60/40? 40/60?

IMO I think NV already goes above and beyond by catering to users running such a niche OS. Dude sounds like a jack wagon.

 

[Rob Williams]

I think the problem is two-fold. First and foremost, because NVIDIA won't give Linux a proper driver for Optimus, it simply means that users are out of luck. More often than not, developers could design an open-sourced driver for the functionality, but because NVIDIA's drivers are proprietary and locked-down, they're just shit out of luck. Now, I don't think it's "impossible" for developers to work around these limitations, but it sure complicates things and isn't the smart way.

Second, Linux does have a small userbase, but reasons like this are why.

 

[madmat]

FWIW there is a project for Optimus that says they have a ready for primetime Linux driver.

And yeah, I don't want an OS designed by a jackhole.

 

[Rob Williams]

I did notice that project, but I'm not sure how well-adopted its driver is. I am not even sure what the effect of not having an Optimus driver on such a notebook is - does it default to the Intel or NVIDIA GPU? If I had to guess, just one of the two GPU drivers is loaded, and on most distros, it'd be the NVIDIA one chosen. I am not even sure I'd consider this a major deal... there is going to be a greater power drain, but these laptops tend to have excellent batteries to begin with.

Also, Linus doesn't design the Linux OS... he's a developer on the kernel - not the same thing.

 

[madmat]

It was a joke, a play on words based on your reason as to why it wasn't widely adopted. I know he's the designer of the kernel.

 

[Rob Williams]

Well, "jackhole" made me laugh, so it wasn't all for naught.

The reason I mentioned something is that it is a common misconception that Linus' role is much larger than it is. That's not to say his role isn't important, because it is, but he doesn't have a say where desktop environments are concerned and things like that. His work is essentially hidden to the user of a Linux OS, just like it is for Mac OS X and Windows.

 

[madmat]

Yeah, it's called Linux because it's based on the kernel he designed and named as such. The actual OS'es are the distros that bundle the UI and GUI around the kernel.