linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX.
if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just appealing to linus' hyperbole.
(I won't even say "appeal to authority" because that's not what you're appealing to. You're literally appealing to his middle finger.)
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EGLStrea...
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 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.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-i-hope-intels-a...
/shrug. The guy can't keep from popping off with obviously false statements about things he knows nothing about. What exactly do you want me to say? Yes, he's been a good manager for the linux kernel, but he is self-admittedly hyperbolic and statements like these show that he really doesn't have an issue running his mouth about things that he really doesn't understand.
It is the old problem with software engineers: they think expertise in one field or one area makes them a certified supergenius with relevant input in completely unrelated areas. I can't count how many times I've seen someone on HN suggest One Weird Trick To Solve Hard Problems in [aerospace/materials sciences/etc]. Linus suffers from the same thing.
His experiences with NVIDIA are probably relevant, and if so we can discuss that, but the fact that he gave someone the middle finger in a Q+A session is not. That's just Linus being an asshole.
(and him being a long-term successful project manager doesn't make him not an asshole either. Jensen's an asshole and he's one of the most successful tech CEOs of all time. Linus doesn't mince words and we should do the same - he's an asshole on a professional level, the "I'm just being blunt!" schtick is just a nice dressing for what would in any other setting be described as a textbook toxic work environment, and his defenses are textbook "haha it's just locker room talk/we're all friends here" excuses that people causing toxic work environment are wont to make. He knows it, he said he'd tone it down, that lasted about a month and he's back to hyperbolic rants about things he doesn't really understand... like ZFS and AVX. But hey I guess they're not directed at people this time.)
Again, if he's got relevant technical input we can discuss that but "linus gives the middle finger!!!!" is not the last word on the topic.
