Fedora project leader 'slams' NVIDIA's proprietary linux driver: Suggests learning from Intel and AMD to 'open source'

On April 4, Fedora project leader Matthew Miller took to social media to "bash" NVIDIA's proprietary linux driver stack, suggesting that the company should "learn" from Intel and AMD in terms of open source driver support .

Matthew Miller tweeted the original:

“Here's the conundrum with @Nvidia drivers on Linux, in a thread. I have a Fedora perspective, obviously, but I think it's a shared problem. (rant which I'm not going to bother to count or number.) #linux # nvidia #opensource #freesoftware”

Matthew Miller said he has his own opinion as a Fedora side on NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver threading issue, but it's an issue worth discussing together.

Below this tweet, Matthew Miller made more than two dozen comments accusing NVIDIA in succession:

"They're intentionally not part of the project of building this shared thing." "they want to benefit from it, sell stuff that benefits from the collective — while keeping their own part walled off." ...they want to benefit from it, sell what benefits from the collective - while isolating parts of themselves)

He said that as a dominant technology giant in the market, NVIDIA's "contribution" in open source is far from enough, and they would rather spend the money on graphics card companies because they are part of the whole open source project! "If we were to do any special extra work, wouldn't companies like AMD and Intel GPU be good?"

At the same time, he also laid out his views on Fedora and other Linuxes - everyone is "building a shared, common good product, a product that belongs to us all" and is building a "digital public good".

Matthew Miller said that today Intel and AMD have supported open source drivers and have made great contributions to upstream Linux components, but NVIDIA, which is also a technology giant, has not done so. He revealed that while FEDORA/Red Hat and others have made efforts to improve the Linux experience with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, it's still not ideal.

He explained that NVIDIA's third-party Nouveau drivers are a "cumbersome" for the company's modern GPU development due to its lack of re-clocking support and firmware signing.

So he called on NVIDIA's engineers to contribute to the open source third-party Nouveau driver: "If you work at NVIDIA and happen to see this, maybe you can make a difference. Come on, join us! Directly on the Nouveau driver work so it can work on the new hardware to have the best performance possible!"

About Fedora:

Fedora is a community-driven open source collaborative project sponsored by Red Hat, with the goal of creating a novel, versatile, and free (open source) operating system (the upstream source for the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution).

For users, Fedora is a full-featured, fast-update free operating system; for sponsor Red Hat, Fedora is a testing platform for many new technologies that are considered usable and will eventually be added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux middle.