Intel, AMD, and Nvidia GPUS - all of them need firmware blobs to work as expected. Intel and AMD offer free drivers but not free firmware.

And if you want to WiFi 5 (ac) or WiFi 6 (ax), chances are that you'll need non-free drivers/firmware as well.

> The "nonguix" channel (hosted on Github) provides packages for vanilla Linux ("linux") in various versions, and also includes firmware packages that you can use in your config file.

Ah, that's good to know.

I'll probably give the Guix package manager a shot some day.

You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card.

You are not entitled to it either. People developing nouveau on their free time don't owe you anything, and nvidia does not owe you an open source driver either.

I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

I don't use nvidia GFX cards on linux anymore (intel suffices for my needs), but when I did, I was happy to have a working driver at all. That was a huge upgrade from my previous ATI card, which had no driver at all. Hell, I even tried using AMD's ROCm recently on Linux with a 5700 card, and it wasn't supported at all... I would have been very happy to hear that AMD had a binary driver that made it work, but unfortunately it doesn't.

And that was very disappointing because I thought AMD had good open source driver support. At least when buying Nvidia for Linux, you know beforehand that you are going to have to use a proprietary driver, and if that makes you uncomfortable, you can buy just something else.

You can only force anyone to do anything if you have power. If you don't have power you're just a weird guy screaming from a soapbox and people are going to ignore you. No offense but do you think nvidia cares about your boycott? There's no shortage of graphics card buyers.

I assume the non-free version of Debian sees significant amounts of downloads, maybe at this point more than the free version, so the situation is obviously quite awful or this post would not exist.

Linux kernel has no stable ABI for drivers as a matter of ideology / strategy, we can debate it's merits but you certainky can't claim it suppports them.

Define good?

I’m not gaming and nouveau works seamlessly OOB and get updated via apt. IMO that’s the best you can get.

What more do I need?

Why are you doing this to yourself.

There are options that have quality open source drivers and quality NDA-free documentation, and you are aware of this.

Not really. Having a closed-source on-card firmware blob but linking it with an open source kernel-side driver would have so many benefits, first of all not needing to depend on NVIDIA to keep up with upstream changes and stuff breaking at every kernel, xorg or whatever upgrade.

It's not so much that they are incompatible. It's that they weren't written for linux. They use the same driver for windows which has been adapted for linux. That also allows them to avoid any sort of derivate work clause that would kick in due to the GPL.

Thanks for reminding me of that - we definitely ran into that some. It wasn’t always with proprietary drivers, though. I think there were cases where legacy intel or amd cards would be incorrectly brought up by the old non-KMS drivers and then the KMS driver wouldn’t load, or maybe vice-versa as there were definitely specific cards within generations of chipsets that were documented as working under KMS/DRM failing and we would have to resort to the legacy drivers.

> But the answer there is not to simultaneously ship both the free and the proprietary stacks.

We didn’t really have a choice given that there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all driver (we didn’t try simpledrm - iirc it went through phases of breakage). But truth be told, while nvidia was the worst and most painful to deploy and upgrade, aside from the issue that we had to choose which version of the nvidia driver we wanted to ship (until we got the conflicting shared dependencies situation worked out by hot swapping the components before loading the driver), it was the most likely to work with all the cards it advertised support for. Only issue there was older cards not supported on current kernel versions or lacking drm drivers altogether.

No, it makes it more expensive to get proprietary drivers for Linux; it is not clear that this is a great loss.

Yes, you can install them and they will break with every single update and you need to re-install them. And you will encounter bugs that no-one has any idea why they are there and no-one will help you with.

>There's an open source driver, nouveau, but of course it's behind the newest hardware.

It's not just behind, it's actively sabotaged by nvidia by locking basic hardware functions behind closed firmware that it encrypted.

With open source and mainlined drivers, it's very difficult to change all the drivers and ensure they work.

Without open source and mainlined drivers, it becomes impossible.

Nope, thanks.

They break. I have a GT730 card which came with my office PC. This card’s support has ended with the 470 driver series, which is one of last (if not the last) release for the previous generation of NVIDIA drivers.

Now, the drivers still ship, and the kernel module is still maintained, but the surrounding GLX drivers are static. As the desktop Linux improves and moves forward, accelerated stuff tends to get migrated to newer technologies, or its GLX use is getting refined. This causes drivers to lose compatibility over time.

This means more and more of your applications fail to start or break in mysterious ways. Also there’s Wayland support issue, which is the elephant in the room.

I had to buy an AMD card which works better, because all the software ecosystem around that card is maintained by volunteers, and the card is architected for working with open drivers well. AMD redesigned its silicon to allow open drivers to work with every unit on the GPU without revealing sensitive information (like HDCP keys) while allowing open drivers to access video encoders and such on the card.

After I got that card, all my problems have just vanished.

So, I’ll never use an NVIDIA card on my computer for the foreseeable future.

Not really - it's more that the functionality for copying the firmware's mode configuration into the kernel exists for the Intel gpu driver and nobody's done the work for the others. I spent a while back in 2011 or so looking at doing this for nouveau but never got things working sufficiently well to merge it.

> And most likely not supporting future kernel versions.

Huh?

That's a you problem, not a Linux problem.

I haven't compiled any drivers for Linux in many, many years, probably decades even.

It helps to avoid Nvidia GPUs however, but even here I haven't seen a big problem in ages (my work computer unfortunately sticks me with an Nvidia, but Debian updates seem to work as normal).

Is this a voting-with-your-wallet position for open drivers / better Linux support, or have you experienced issues in the past with the proprietary drivers?

I ask because Linux with an Nvidia gpu is my daily driver (desktop), and I’m likely to build another system like that again, was just curious what I don’t know.

proprietary drivers/blobs: no way in hell

kernel: since the kernel is GPL, you can theoretically patch it yourself but it's a massive undertaking.