Nvidia now only sort of cares about linux because of gpgpu applications. They still clearly don't care about gaming on linux; or desktop stability.
Yes, I will take Nouveau over the official drivers whenever I can.
Nouveau has never been more stable, or nearly as performant as official NVIDIA drivers. I've had the exact opposite experience from you on every laptop I've had since Nouveau was released, so we must live in different universes.
> Linux clearly was a second class citizen for nvidia
And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)
Anyway, I think we've exhausted our arguments here, and are just talking past each other now. Have a good day.
Nouveau is an awesome project, but for later cards it's basically a dead project. You can get some features to work, but without proper power management there's no justifiable reason to daily-drive it. The proprietary driver is by no means perfect (particularly for Wayland) but it's the only real option if you own a modern card.
> And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)
They must be awfully curious about why Xserve failed, then.
On some of the older devices, nouveau actually works very well right now. On these devices the open driver is as stable and performant as the closed driver and has all of the same features with the exception being GPU compute stuff.
I think mostly people misunderstand the limitations of the nouveau drivers and just assume they are bad in general, but it's very much dependent on the device.
One of the big issues right now is that nouveau can't bring the newer GPUs out of "idle mode". Nvidia has explicitly restricted this feature and the chances of the issue being resolved without cooperation from Nvidia is very low. I think a lot of people try nouveau on the effected GPUs and have horrible performance and then assume it's because nouveau is bad.
I have had an interesting experience with nouveau on the GT 710. For a little while there was a bug that would cause sway to crash back to tty, at first it would happen maybe once a day, then it became so bad that it would crash as soon as sway was launched. Now in kernel 6.3.3 it seems to be working flawlessly, which is how it was at some point in the past too.
Right now nouveau is working great for me though, so it is possible for nouveau to compete with the closed drivers in specific cases, but in general, for more modern GPUs it will have very low performance due to the reclocking thing.
I use a lot of openbsd and you won't be running nvidea drivers on openbsd for love or money. there is nouveau and they are doing amazing work, however, they are also up against a petty, secretive company that appears to hate them. So nvidea is out.
Understandably openbsd gets zero support from the manufactures. So we need an opensource driver and some brave heroic soul to volunteer their time to get it running.
AMD drivers worked well enough and if you want decent 3d acceleration the only real choice. However they tended to crash and 3d acceleration is usually not a priority if using openbsd. Also starting with amdgpu the drivers got big, really big. The amdgpu driver nearly has more code then the rest of the openbsd kernel[1]. it is this big mess of generated code where each card uses a slightly different ISA. I understand why having a stable ISA is not a priority for AMD(it lets them change the card architecture easier) however sometimes i wish it were documented and pinned down. it would certainly make for a more stable driver that is easier to integrate.
And then there is intel, Note that I have not used intel graphics since 2016 so my experience is out of date. but once you got past the first generation of intel graphics the experience was rock solid, the drivers always worked well for me. if asked for the best openbsd experience I would recommend intel every time. However my last few machines have been amd and unfortunately there is no intel graphics add-in card(i looked). My last intel box I had an amd 3d card but I only used it under windows to play games. for work/openbsd I would just use the onboard intel graphics as they were more stable.