How is nouveau doing this days compared to the proprietary drivers of NVidia ?
The short of it is, every card has 2d support. There are very few lacking 3d acceleration. Newer cards have flimsy video acceleration. Power management is severely lacking across the board. Specific advanced features are hit or miss. Performance is still behind the proprietary driver in every case I've seen; but for cards from the 200 to 700 series, it's a smaller drop-off than newer cards.
I'd recommend giving it a try and see how it works in your specific use case. I've personally never found a case where nouveau works well enough to drop the Nvidia driver, but I'm usually on the latest or next to latest gen.
For newer cards, nouveau can be a quite sad experience due to nvidia not only making a mess of their own driver, but actively handicapping development of nouveau.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) here is some interesting info on the state, with a lot of references
nvidia are a bunch of dicks who have no real reason to keep their specifications closed other than to (speculating) hide things they don't want you to see. patents and other things will still protect their IP / featuresets even if they open it.... intel/amd are where people should invest, especially people who are using alternate (non-windows) platforms, since nvidia will never open their sources, and amd/intel will never improve the way you want if you don't invest in their future!
`if (game == "Fifa2016") use_nvidia_custom_shaders() ...`
So games don't work quite fast and the game companies ask nVidia to fix it in their drivers, which might do stuff such as adding custom shaders to get that good fps. That's why many major games require you to update to the latest nVidia drivers before running.
I don't know how much AMD does this, their open source support is excellent nowadays.
That's not how it works. Even if you patent something others can copy it (and I don't mean just the source, but the idea, algorithm, implementation) and use it in their products and then you're left with the work of completely reverse engineer them, figure it all out, then sue them, etc.
So you can either do that or just never open your source. Who can blame them?
BTW, I believe the reason it's not supported isn't because OS developers don't understand how it works - it's because Nvidia has never released the private keys associated with power management on the GPU. So the only thing Nvidia's got to do is to provide these keys to the open-source community. So it is a DRM issue.
Does that seems like a world where FOSS can be successful in ?
It means that people writing wayland compositors have to write a EGL stream version because of a purely one-sided nvidia decision.
EGL Stream support in Mutter (gnome) is supported a bit by Nvidia but that's it.
Between spending time on improving a compositor and the window managers making use of it or spending time to support non standard driver implementation because of one-sided decision from nvidia, it seems to me that the first choice is a smarter one.
if (nvidia) {
// thousands of lines of code
} else {
// thousands of lines of code
}
There is also a difference between data exchange (codecs, doc*, etc) and drivers. Intransigence by the kernel community regarding closed source code has resulted in Good Things in the driver space.
It's only nVidia that would be excluded, due to them acting like children and trying to push proprietary things as the only GPU vendor.
That works great with sway
B: continue using i3 with X
Uh... how about I just not use your software? I'm not going to replace a couple thousand dollars in GPUs, or even buy a new specific GPU just so I can use your software.
Also, what the hell are you using a couple thousand dollars in consumer nVidia GPUs for on a Linux system?
RE: Sway, I'm glad they hit this milestone, I have a friend who is using it and he claims it's almost as good, (although he hasn't found a way to do -gaps yet..).
Last time I used Wayland/Sway I couldn't get decent font rendering. Has the situation improved?
Font rendering on sway is in all respects equivalent to font rendering on i3.
Wayland and Sway don't touch font rendering as far as I know. There should be no difference between font rendering on X and Wayland. Perhaps you were getting blurred out fonts due to scaling?
The fonts always appeared super sharp and jagged on Wayland when compared to X11.
As far as I understand, this is a problem in XWayland and GNOME uses a hack to make XWayland applications render without scaling (since X11 Qt/Gtk+ applications use their own scaling). But it makes using Firefox et al. way more convenient to use.
Though there is a wayland version of firefox, which I plan on trying out.
edit: spelling. I am apparently terrible at leaving comments from my phone.
By the way, check out waymonad, it's based on the same wlroots library as sway:
Excited to use this soon if it lands in Debian 10 Buster.