Bonum Certa Men Certa

On Nvidia Cards and GNU/Linux: Why You Should Make Sure Your Next PC Doesn’t Have an Nvidia Card

Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original

Back in the days, nobody made a good GNU/Linux graphics solution that had an open source driver stack.



In fact, even today 15 or 20 years later, AMD and Intel do not have drivers that are fully open or Free (as in Freedom). All of the big three require at least signed binary-only firmware modules to be downloaded into the cards, or else they don’t expose their 3d engines to the operating system, and without that, you won’t be doing much of anything.



But Nvidia has been a longtime thorn in the side of the GNU/Linux desktop user. On one hand, there’s the argument that when you load their proprietary driver, you get great performance. I’m not here to argue this point because nobody is saying you won’t.



"Since Nvidia’s driver is not supported by Linux, it may run, but nobody will know how to help you when it causes problems."What I will argue, instead, is the maintainability problems and the ethical side of the debate.



When you choose Nvidia, instead of funding hardware companies that put working drivers into the Linux kernel, X11, Wayland, and Mesa3d (an open source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan 3d graphics APIs), you give money to a company that bypasses the GNU/Linux driver stack and tosses a large “blob” of code that’s literally just a Windows driver that they ported over with a “kernel glue layer”.



Many people consider it to be illegal to ship an operating system with this driver included, which is why most of them make you go get it somehow, and bolt it on after the fact. The process isn’t even consistent because there’s as many ways to do it as there are distributions you could install it on.



Although Nvidia’s license doesn’t disallow it, Linux is under the GNU General Public License, which says that anything that is linked to the kernel and distributed with it is a derived work.



"Nvidia likes to refuse to implement standard programming interfaces and then demand that unpaid (by Nvidia, at least) Free Software developers instead port their project to Nvidia’s alternative facts."Therefore, if a distribution ships Nvidia’s proprietary driver in a way that you don’t have to do anything in order to get it, they’re a GPL violator. Plain and simple. The Linux maintainers probably won’t enforce it, but it’s still wrong.



Debian and many other distributions warn (in neutral language, but most people have no reason to use the proprietary AMD driver since the open source one is fine) that if you get the Nvidia driver straight from Nvidia’s website, and install it, it will only work for the kernel you installed it with.



As soon as your distribution ships a new kernel, it will have a different application binary interface, and even if somehow it does not, Nvidia’s generic installer package isn’t set up to where it would place a new module into the new kernel. In fact, even if you do get Nvidia’s driver from a source that rebuilds it automatically, you have to wait until dkms rebuilds it each time you get a new kernel. That doesn’t happen a lot with Debian, but new kernels arrive all the time in Fedora. It also adds complexity, and something that might fail.



Also, I think that with Microsoft’s “Security Theater Boot” turned on, you can’t actually install Nvidia’s package directly. It needs to be from your distribution so they can sign it. Not that this will stop Nvidia’s installer from saying it succeeded, but when you reboot you’ll see a security policy violation instead of your OS booting. Lovely.



I don’t know exactly how badly this would break these days, because I got tired of Nvidia and was one of the earliest adopters of AMD’s Evergreen series (Radeon HD 5xxx) when they announced an open source solution. At the time I last saw, the kernel would boot the broken configuration Nvidia left it in and then X11 wouldn’t start because the settings referenced a driver setup that no longer existed.



Further, Nvidia would overwrite the system’s OpenGL drivers, so if you removed their driver and installed a competitor’s product, it wouldn’t function properly if it used Mesa3d to provide OpenGL, at least unless you knew how to fix it, or until your operating system installed an update that replaced Mesa3d’s missing libGL.so library. It also left behind deliberately misconfigured settings files all over the OS.



The Romans used to call this “poisoning the well”. If they couldn’t hold territory that they invaded, nobody else could have it either.



Since Nvidia’s driver is not supported by Linux, it may run, but nobody will know how to help you when it causes problems.



Loading the Nvidia module “taints” the kernel, so that you can’t file bug reports. Every kernel developer I’ve talked to was fed up with wasting their time when the Nvidia driver causes bugs all over the kernel tree, including sometimes in the printing system, the file system, and the input devices, or causes an internal structure to become corrupt resulting in a system crash.



Hey, why would you want stability anyway?



So they fixed the problem on their end by ignoring bug reports from people with this driver loaded. Since they can’t fix the driver, and you can’t ask them to, go talk to Nvidia. But Nvidia doesn’t always care. Like most companies, if they can hide behind the fact that you can’t “prove it” or at least that you have no power to compel them to fix it, they will, and things stay broken.



Since Nvidia doesn’t implement standard GNU/Linux, X, Wayland, and Mesa interfaces, sometimes their users don’t get features that the rest of us do for years, or at all.



Nvidia likes to refuse to implement standard programming interfaces and then demand that unpaid (by Nvidia, at least) Free Software developers instead port their project to Nvidia’s alternative facts.



This is sleazy because it abuses the Free Software developers and forces them to do unpaid work for Nvidia to keep their users happy. In the case of GNOME, you couldn’t use the Wayland session at all on Nvidia cards for years. Then it loaded but was too broken to use for years. And I think you can use it now.



Not because Nvidia fixed anything, but because Red Hat implemented a nasty hack that got “XWayland” to run, and you need that for a ton of software, even today, including Wine (to run Windows programs).



But you’ll get used to nasty hacks soon enough if you use proprietary drivers. In fact, most vendors aren’t even as “good” as Nvidia about ever updating them again.



Did I tell you the story about my Avermedia TV Tuner Card that only worked on 32-bit Ubuntu 8.04 and never got updated again? It crashed the kernel too. Cool story, right? I know.



In the past, Nvidia wrote a very slow 2d-only driver called NV.



The only reason it existed was so that X11 would have something to load so you could load the proprietary driver. Today, the “stub” (although on older cards it usually works well enough to keep) usually ends up being nouveau.



If you have an old Nvidia card, nouveau (a reverse engineered open source driver) might run it satisfactorily, but almost certainly won’t if the card is new.



Early on, I was excited for nouveau because they were reverse engineering the card’s firmware too, which meant you didn’t need anything from Nvidia to make the supported cards work.



Then Nvidia announced that they would enforce firmware signing. Allegedly for security reasons, but really because they don’t want anyone to know how their cards work. At all. Not on the driver level, but especially not in firmware.



So they made their binary-only firmware redistributable, but mostly don’t contribute to the nouveau driver. So you would have the same firmware situation (binary-only, redistributable) as with the other drivers, only without an open source operating system-level driver to run the card correctly once it was initialized. The worst possible outcome.



If you need high performance graphics, the AMD open source driver is good. If you just need acceptable graphics in a laptop, Intel’s graphics are at least alright, and both have open source drivers you don’t ever have to configure or think about.



If you install a new operating system component that relates to the drivers, you get a newer version of that component, and it all happens behind the scenes while you use the computer normally.



In software development, there’s a term called technical debt, where a solution that is “fast and easy” at first becomes a snowballing burden that causes more work for you to maintain than having just done things right the first time.



Nvidia will cause you more work and problems than they are worth, even if their products are a bit faster than the competing ones in the lineup.



Right, but how bad can Nvidia be?



I gave away my last Nvidia card and forked the Linux kernel and brought in updated Mesa3d packages before there was a proper release working with my AMD Evergreen card to get early access to AMD’s code. This was somehow more pleasant than dealing with a crashing unstable system due to the Nvidia driver.



Today, over a decade later, you obviously wouldn’t even need to do that, if you want an AMD card, because the infrastructure is mature.



Nvidia does nasty things to Windows users too.



They do market segmentation and use their driver to selectively cripple the hardware. At one point, last year I think, they used the driver to limit bitcoin mining, but Nvidia ultimately proved themselves to be too stupid to enforce that when they accidentally leaked a driver that didn’t enforce the hash rate limiter.



Most of the “updates” to make particular applications work “better” just disable features in the program that their hardware doesn’t get along well with and which is making them look bad. Then the framerate goes up. It doesn’t actually make the game or application any better.



In fact, it may look worse. Speed cheats have been around in proprietary video drivers for a long time. ATI even did it with Quake. At that point in time, it was so crude that if you wanted to cause the driver not to load the hacks, I believe you just needed to rename the executable file for the game.



Nvidia has a history of killing companies that do innovate.



When they bought 3dfx and shut them down, for example. 3dfx had better products, but had run into financial dire straits, and so Nvidia bought them simply to acquire patents, eliminate a competitor, and then keep pushing Nvidia junk on us.



Like most companies, they use others, but they don’t contribute.



Like Microsoft not paying taxes, but getting government contracts anyway, Nvidia treats the organizations that make it possible to run their products at all on GNU/Linux badly.



Recently, the Xorg maintainers have lamented the fact that nobody in the industry wants to step up and even be a stable release branch maintainer. For a long time, the stable release branch maintainer was Apple, which at least needed a working X Server, for XQuartz (similar to XWayland in concept), but now Xorg is basically bit rotting, while companies that make serious bank off of GNU/Linux business, such as Nvidia, let it happen, and won’t even lift a finger to assist in making bugfix releases to this thing that’s almost in mothball development mode.



IBM/Red Hat’s solution to Xorg rotting away is to try to take the next step away from it on GNU/Linux and just abandon the pieces that Wayland doesn’t use. Even Debian 11 with GNOME doesn’t strictly need all of Xorg in order to run properly these days. With Wayland-compatible graphics, you could run a system with no Xorg, only XWayland, but I think we’re still a couple of years off from ditching Xorg. Ubuntu still defaults to it for reasons, and some of those reasons are Nvidia won’t help make their cards work well in Wayland, but also won’t help maintain Xorg.



Giving money to Nvidia helps them harm us and set us back.



Funding Nvidia is similar in concept, I think, to funding hostile countries that have oil that sponsor terror and politicians who deny global warming instead of having public transportation.



Okay, well, maybe it’s not THAT bad, but you get my point. That it takes money that could go to a company that actually supports us and minimizes the overall harm to the computing ecosystem that we all benefit from, and sends it to a company hostile to all things Free and Open Source, which makes massive profits, and then won’t support the infrastructure.



Nvidia is riding high on a Bitcoin Bubble.



I really hope, for many reasons, this crashes, hard and fast, someday soon, and that it completely hoses Nvidia when it does. We would be better off with Nvidia in bankruptcy than churning out products that are this harmful and corrosive to our cause.



But you can help, a little, in your individual capacity, by not buying anything that has an Nvidia logo on it.



When I was critical of Nvidia in the Fedora support channels, I was warned that I violated their Code of Conduct by “insulting” a company. This is just one of the many reasons I won’t use Fedora anymore. Their community is gone, their other desktop spins are horrible, their main spin doesn’t work all that well these days and the people making the decisions do bizarre and incomprehensible things, but the idea that you can’t speak openly, and honestly, and not even in a profane manner about Nvidia… And how do you insult a company anyway, and why would anyone honestly care if you did?



Fedora’s position is “These Nvidia devices are out there and you can’t avoid them, especially on laptops.”. I have three laptops and zero Nvidia chips in them. It must be because that’s impossible.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
 
Vice President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Complains That Techrights Gives Visibility to Legal and Technical Issues at the EPO
"Follow-up on enquiries relating to Dir. 1218 and 1001"
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Various Slopfarms That Lie About "Linux" and Are Promoted by Google News
Google does not seem interested in tackling this problem
Links 09/07/2025: War Updates and Microsoft Moving to India to Cut Costs
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Was Always a 'Movement' of Inclusion of Tolerance
Even the licences themselves remove access barriers
Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
Links for the day
Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
just trying to make a lot of trouble
Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
Computers Are Just a Tool
People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
Apple Way Past Its Prime
Apple deserves a decline
The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
Links for the day
Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
Links for the day
FSF40 T-shirt message
by Alex Oliva
Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
Links for the day
More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
"pepe the frogs"
Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
Links for the day
Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
Answers must be given
Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025
Layoffs and Shutdowns at IBM, Not Just Microsoft
Same as Microsoft
The FSF's (Free Software Foundation, Inc.) 2025 Summer Fundraiser Already Past Halfway Line
This is where GNU/Linux actually started
With Workers Back From a Holiday Weekend, Microsoft Layoffs Carry on, More Waves to Come
Now it's Monday and people are bad to work, even some journalists
Mozilla Had No Good Reason to Outsource Firefox Development to Microsoft
What does Mozilla plan to do when GitHub shuts down?
Mozilla Firefox Did Not Die, It Got Killed
To me it'll always look like Mozilla got killed by its sponsors, especially Google, which had a conflict of interest as a sponsor
You Need Not Wave a Rainbow Flag This Month to Basically Oppose Arseholes Looking to Disrupt and Divide the Community
Don't fall for it
Dan Neidle, Whom Brett Wilson LLP SLAPPed (on Behalf of Corrupt Rich Tax Evaders), Still Fighting the Good Fight
Neidle fights for the poor people
What Miguel de Icaza and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
Similar aims, different methods
Wayland Should Start by Dumping Its Very Ugly Logo
Wayland wins the "ugliest logo" award every year
Stop Focusing on Hair Colours, Focus on Corporate Agenda
If someone commits a crime, it does not matter if his or her hair was mostly white or there was no hair or a wig or whatever
Links 07/07/2025: Science, Conflicts, and a Fictional K-pop Group
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/07/2025: Being a Luddite and Announcement of Gotify
Links for the day
Links 07/07/2025: XBox Effectively 'Dead', DMCA Subpoena Versus Registrar
Links for the day
The 'Corporate Neckbeard' is Not the "Good Guy"
Works for IBM
The Nasty Smear (and Stereotype) of "Neckbeard" or "Greybeard" is Ageism
This is the sort of stuff they might try to volley at critics of Wayland
Why Many of Us Use X Server and Will Continue to Use It For Many Years to Come
Don't make this about politics
Microsoft's Nat Friedman Became Unemployed the Same Time the SLAPPs Against Techrights Started Coming From His Friends (Weeks After We Had Exposed Scandals About Him and the Serial Strangler, His Best Friend, Who Got Arrested a Few Days Later)
Nat Friedman is not "Investor, entrepreneur"
Brett Wilson LLP Uses Threats to Demand Changes to Pages or Removal of Pages Without Even Revealing Which Staff Member Does That (Sometimes People From Another Firm!)
This has been in the public for years
Dan Neidle Said "It Really Then Became a Job of Tormenting" Lawyers Like Brett Wilson LLP (Who Threatened Him for Exposing Crimes, Just Like They Threatened My Wife a Few Months Later)
he and his wife decided to take on the evil people and their evil lawyers
Large Language Models (LLMs) Externalise Their Cost to the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
"The forty-sixth Free Software Bulletin is now available online!"
Weeding Out Extremism in Our Community
To me it seems like Microsoft Lunduke is rapidly becoming like a "hate preacher" who operates online, breeding an extremist ideology or trying to soften its image
Censorship Versus Fact-Checking and Quality Control
It's not censorship but a matter of quality control
Reinforcing the Allegations Some More, Bryan Lunduke Digs His Own Grave
In his latest episodes he merely repeats his own lies, which I debunked using evidence right from his own mouth
Global Warming and Free Software as a Force of Mitigation
we'll need to think about Software Freedom, not just brands like "Linux"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 06, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, July 06, 2025
Gemini Links 07/07/2025: BaseLibre Numerical System and TUI Rant
Links for the day