I’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly?

Compared to nothing. I have used Nvidia graphics cards under Linux for many years. The last one was a GTX 1070. In order for the cards to work, I had to install the driver once with the command pacman -S nvidia-dkms. So the effort was very small.

By the way, I am currently using a 6800 XT from AMD. I therefore don't want to defend Nvidia graphics cards across the board.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Nvidia, many people do not judge objectively. Torvalds' "fuck you", for example, referred to what he saw as Nvidia's lack of cooperation with the kernel developers. And i think he was right. But it was never about how good or bad the graphics cards were usable under Linux. Which, unfortunately, many Linux users claim. Be it out of lack of knowledge or on purpose.

Since then, some things have changed and Nvidia has contributed code to several projects like Plasma or Mesa to improve the situation regarding Wayland.

I'm messing with shitvidia now on a new AAA laptop after people said it just works. I just spent all day trying to setup EFI keys for secure boot because shitvidia doesn't sign their kernel drivers module. Plus their drivers are outdated and their documentation is terrible. I failed today because Gigabyte is another shit company that has a proprietary (theft) bootloader set so that no one can lock the UEFI secure boot with any PK except theirs. I can run Fedora's key issued by Microsoft to run it with secure boot enabled, but then I can't use the god dam GPU I bought the piece of shit for in the first place. Shitvidia will always be shitvidia. This proprietary bullshit is straight up theft. It should be illegal to sell anything with digital reservations of any kind. Dealing with all this, I think Stallman was ultra conservative right wing. Fuck these criminals.

The problem is that Nvidia's software stack is much more advanced. For example machine learning acceleration, CUDa is miles better than Rocm and widely supported. I wish AMD were more serious about GPUs and made greater strides, but they overslept and let Nvidia become a de-facto monopolists with their anti competitive/consumers strategies and closed source strides.

Nvidia is the new Apple, unfortunately.

I believe that in addition, Nvidia support for wayland was late compare to AMD.

Man… I get the inspiration for the sites name, but Piped absolutely sounds like it’s a porn website.

Things have improved a lot in the 11 years since Linus made that statement. For the most part Nvidia drivers just work. They have even released some opensource drivers fairly recently that will go a long way to making things even better, especially for the existing OSS drivers.

But they are still not perfect. They do keep doing their own thing for years before finally giving up and doing what everyone else is. The latest of which was the EGL Streams API nvidia created for wayland where everyone else was using GBM APIs which forced many window managers and applications to have to explicitly support nvidia drivers. But they have now switched to GBM like everything else (though last I heard their implementations were far from bug-free, things have likely improved since then those as that was over a year ago now).

Nvidia cards are mostly working fine these days as long as you're not using Wayland. If you're using Wayland, be prepared to encounter lots of minor annoyances, and perhaps some bugs that completely break your workflow depending what you're using Linux for (e g. on server you don't have to deal with sleep issues, but in desktop it's an annoyance while on laptop it might be a deal breaker).

I've only used one AMD card with Linux and it was so smooth I never thought about it. Lately I've been using nvidia for one year and I'm losing my sanity with it. Switching back to AMD next week.