r/linux • u/lajka30 • May 22 '26
Development Phoronix just posted a pic with Jensen Huang teasing “exciting things happening on Linux” — what are we expecting?
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u/secret019960609 May 22 '26
their faces are so interesting
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u/Niwrats May 23 '26
left one spent 20 years writing phoronix articles nonstop without breaks.
right one is AI generated.
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u/BinkReddit May 22 '26
How about I don't care? They haven't been good stewards of their Linux drivers for an exceptionally long time. They have plenty of money, so I'm happy to give my money to the companies that do a better job supporting my favorite operating system.
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u/Floppie7th May 22 '26
They haven't been good stewards of their Linux drivers for an exceptionally long time
Have they ever?
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u/mrlinkwii May 22 '26
technically yes in the early 2000s , their was a point were nvidia drivers were miles better than ati in the early 2000 ati drivers were shit
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u/Floppie7th May 22 '26
Yeah, I used an Nvidia card back then for that reason - but they were never good, they were just less bad than ATI. They were no better than they are today - proprietary blobs that mostly work for most setups.
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u/Jazzlike_Magazine_76 May 22 '26
UT2004 worked better on Linux at launch than on Windows, if you were using Nvidia back then.
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u/randylush May 23 '26
I wonder if people still play UT2004 anymore or if it’s just bots. That was such a good game.
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u/FionaSarah May 23 '26
Yes people still play it! It's freely available with fan made pre packaged installers. Never been more easy to play https://github.com/OldUnreal/FullGameInstallers
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u/ProFeces May 22 '26
You just described device drivers as a whole, especially in that time period. I've exclusively used Linux since the late 90's for my main PC, and there was almost no device from back then that didn't have significant driver issues unless the community, or you yourself, made drovers for them.
I'd argue that in that period of time, they were probably the best at supporting their hardware. Especially around 2003/4 when everyone started shifting to 64 bit OS'. Oh man what a nightmarish time for compatibility and support that was. Literally, the one piece of hardware I didn't have issues with was my GPU.
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u/chiniwini May 23 '26
their was a point were nvidia drivers were miles better than ati
That doesn't mean they were good, just that ATI's were terrible.
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u/linuxwes May 22 '26
Nvidia used to be what the community recommended for Linux gaming because the drivers were significantly better than AMD.
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u/platinummyr May 22 '26
It's not entirely related, since it's a separate division, but the team that maintains the network drivers for Nvidia Mellanox does alright, and pays for some of the key maintainer roles such as devlink. But it's not the graphics drivers that's for sure.
And their intree graphics drivers have always been a thorn on Linux kernel with how limited the support is
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u/unixmachine May 22 '26
I followed the trend on Reddit and bought an AMD GPU to use on Linux. I've only had problems, and they were annoying problems like random system freezes. It's a bug that's been known for at least 5 years.
I've never had problems with Nvidia GPUs, they've always been solid. I'm using one now instead of a AMD GPU. People say there's a performance drop in DX12, but I haven't noticed it much, I don't usually play such new games.
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u/flecom May 23 '26
I upgraded my 5700xt to a 7900xtx and had nothing but problems in linux, tried it in windows and had some strange issues as well, exchanged the card at microcenter and new card works just fine in both
could be a bum card?
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u/Particular_Wear_6960 May 23 '26
I didn't notice a FPS drop either. Every single thread where the subject came up people trashed Nvidia's performance on Linux and here I am playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 60 fps with everything on high/ultra. I remember playing games 15 years ago on Linux where things barely ran at all so I guess coming from then to now it seems like such a negligible difference that it's hardly worth mentioning.
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u/unixmachine May 23 '26
It depends a lot on the game, but that's already been fixed. Proton just needs to implement it (a large part of the work has already been done). It should be released in the next few days.
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u/BinkReddit May 22 '26
I have an AMD GPU in my production workstation and it Just Works. I also frequently try the mainline Linux kernel and I never have to worry if there's going to be issues with my graphics driver talking to the latest kernel.
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u/unixmachine May 22 '26
I don't doubt it, it's a matter of personal experience. Computer hardware with diverse configurations is quite unpredictable.
That's why I'm no longer going to engage with narratives like "Nvidia is bad, AMD is good." I'll just share my experience. In my case, with two GPUs, a 6600XT and a 7600, I had many problems with both. At the same time, with a 1660 Ti, 3060 Ti, and 5070 Ti, I had no problems. Laptops with Intel graphics: the best experience of all of them. Laptops with AMD APUs: overheating (it was in 2011, AMD was very bad on Linux).
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u/Shoddy_Scallion9362 May 22 '26
I have been using a Radeon RX 6700 XT with Arch Linux for five years without any significant issues. However, I am not a hardcore gamer.
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u/IamThunderFart May 22 '26
6900xt here running smoothly for 5 years now 🤷
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u/Floppie7th May 22 '26
Yeah, I obviously can't comment on issues with someone else's setup, but I've had a 6900xt since 2021 and it works great. And, to the Intel point, the A380 I have for video transcoding in one of my servers also works great. The only drivers I've ever had issues with were Nvidia (but also didn't use a Radeon back when they were still ATI)
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u/Brillegeit May 23 '26
I've got three different AMD cards and they all suffer from similar power management and sleep/wake issues crashing different parts of the system. It's not unusual to start my Monday morning at the office by going to TTY2 and rebooting since the driver killed the graphical stack for some reason.
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u/Bombini_Bombus May 26 '26
(Linux on) Reddit is mostly filled with kids and toddlers who don't even know what they're talking about.
NVIDIA always been the way to go, I'm using their GPUs with Linux since KDE 3.5 and everything always worked well in gaming fields and (lately) in
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u/morganmachine91 May 23 '26
I had loads of problems when I switched to AMD, but in my case I was just a dummy who left NVIDIA env variables laying around and forgot about them.
Just curious, what random system freezes bug were you dealing with? I did have some issues with freezes at some point that I think were GPU driver related on my 7900xtx, had to switch to an LTS kernel for a while, they’re resolved now though.
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u/unixmachine May 23 '26
kwin_wayland_drm: Pageflip timed out! This is a bug in the amdgpu kernel driver
This bug happened almost every day. The entire system would freeze or lose signal and get stuck on a black screen, forcing me to restart the PC and lose everything I had open.
ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout
This also happened.
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u/Literallyapig May 22 '26
as a nvidia user (turing gpu), i've been using linux with it for years and never had many problems. with wayland specifically, i think nvidia actually started to care from the 555 drivers onwards, nowadays ive had no issues with them. the only thing thats sucks is the drivers being proprietary.
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u/dkarlovi May 23 '26
The only issue I remember having is the screen flashing which was fixed quite a while ago. Other than that, it just works. I don't know what people are talking about. I'm using Nvidia and Linux forever and this is the most stable and best UX I've ever had.
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u/AdventurousFly4909 May 22 '26
I haven't had any problems with the drivers only with how distros package them.
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u/SupplePigeon May 22 '26
We want Linux to continue to flourish and grow. We can’t forever hold a grudge, progress be damned. If Nvidia wants to make their contributions to Linux better, why be petty about it?
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u/acostoss May 22 '26
It's less about a grudge, and more about being burnt multiple times already and thus no longer willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'll believe it when I see it, but until then, it's more hot air.
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u/boukensha15 May 22 '26
Hmm..
May be I am crazy but I agreed both with this comment and the one it is a reply to. And upvoted them both. :)
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u/spikederailed May 22 '26
Even on the windows side their drivers have not been great as of recently. Even if it was not for the 12v2x6 I would have purchased AMD for OpenSource drivers alone.
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u/nicman24 May 22 '26
Not really the case since the ai boom
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u/kigurai May 22 '26
Nvidia drivers and cuda are literally my only recurring OS problems. It's certainly better than a few years ago, but it's still a pain at times.
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u/ibeerianhamhock May 22 '26
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable that they don't want their proprietary drivers in the linux kernel even if we wish they did. IMHO if AMD was cutting edge in gaming (they are doing quite well in AI and HPC though tbh), they probably would have always done the same thing.
In the future I see most of their proprietary stuff just living in firmware and they will just release open source drivers for linux. I'm guessing we're 1-2 gens from that reality. It's already partially the case now, which is why nvidia GPUs have a lot better support than they used to in linux.
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u/jaggafoxy May 23 '26
They might actually make the Linux drivers decent. Now Anthropic has hooks into Blender like claude code, Nvidia might want to capitalise on this, get headless Blender running in the cloud via an AI interface or Agents, which will be running Linux, and will need good drivers. Any benefits to desktop users is incidental to whatever else they are doing at this point.
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u/SystemAxis May 22 '26
My guess is better Wayland/Vulkan support and general Linux driver improvements. NVIDIA has clearly been investing more into Linux recently. Could also be some AI and compute announcements mixed in, since a lot of NVIDIA’s Linux focus is in that space too.
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u/Skullrocks May 22 '26
Most probably 95% AI bullcrap, if not 100%.
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u/DehydratedButTired May 22 '26
95% closed source, one 5% contribution of something to Linux that they are gonna try to coast on for years.
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u/ReptilianLaserbeam May 22 '26
Nah, probably support for the new GPUs that are used by AI models and training.
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u/Prestigious_Boat_386 May 23 '26
Don't be silly, we actually want the first thing. It'll never happen
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u/rafuru May 22 '26
AI bullshit. Jensen is a fckn scammer that will convince everyone that they need AI somehow.
We really need an actual chip competitor to burst Nvidia's bubble.
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u/jason-reddit-public May 22 '26
Kind of like custom asics started to be used for crypto mining, Google and other companies AI chips are chipping away at NVidia's dominance (in the DC). A couple more years and folks might be able to afford gaming GPUs again (though HBM and other fab capacity still might prevent this).
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u/DDOSBreakfast May 22 '26
They can't keep spending money at this rate for a long time. Their revenues let alone profits from AI have been fairly minimal.
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u/steakanabake May 22 '26
theyre all passing around the same 5 bucks its not like any of this is actually generating new money its just an ouroborus of bullshit.
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u/jason-reddit-public May 22 '26
I agree we are in a bubble but the frontier players with deep pockets are all in. (The smartest players are selling the shovels.)
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u/randylush May 23 '26
That is definitely true, but at a certain point, people may stop buying shovels.
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u/NotFromSkane May 23 '26
Are they really? I was under the impression that NVIDIA were the only ones making real money here. Selling the shovels during the gold rush and all that.
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u/NoInterviewsManyApps May 24 '26
Intel just came up as one, people didn't buy them
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u/Playful_Emotion4736 May 25 '26
We really need an actual chip competitor to burst Nvidia's bubble.
I was just thinking about that. It'd be nice to have a GPU manufacturer for gaming only. But I don't know how it's possible anymore as "AI" companies will still buy all of their chips, keeping prices high. The whole AI hype just made gaming (and even general computing) unfordable.
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u/mrlinkwii May 22 '26
Jensen is a fckn scammer that will convince everyone that they need AI somehow
how are they a scammer , curious
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u/DerekB52 May 22 '26
Because AI is a scam. It can maybe do 10% of what people are promising(i'm probably being too generous)
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u/SethDusek5 May 22 '26
When is the last time you used ai?
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u/insanelygreat May 23 '26
Were you around for the dotcom boom and bust? It was obvious the internet was going to be a big deal, but the hype had people making some very stupid business decisions based on some extremely unrealistic expectations. Most of them were not otherwise stupid people. This feels very similar.
Much of the rest of the economy is different from 2000, so I won't stretch the comparison beyond that.
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u/Albos_Mum May 23 '26
Another example is the cloud. Almost all of us use it even indirectly to this day but lotta people seem to forget that at one point almost every tech company was trying to push cloud this, cloud that.
Heck, Microsoft even tried to sell the idea that the Xbox One would make up for its slow CPU by leveraging the cloud for extra computation and a lot of people lapped that up despite the clear obstacles to that being a reality for anything worthwhile.
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u/insanelygreat May 23 '26
That's a great analogy because a lot of basic systems-level skills started to disappear amongst developers after the public cloud became the default. Obviously not everyone, but on average. I can see that happening with the rise of vibe coding.
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u/randylush May 23 '26
Exactly right.
Cloud infrastructure was “hard” for a short time, until it wasn’t. It became a solved problem in about 5 years. Cloud engineers went from collecting enormous salaries at top 5, to jumping to tertiary companies like Oracle, to today, where a “cloud” engineer is a completely obsolete term that will put you at the bottom of the resume pile.
I rode that wave. I’m riding the AI wave now.
AI is going to be a solved problem in 5 years. There is a ceiling of usefulness and innovation, just like the cloud, just like e-commerce, just like OS development. It seems hard at first but it will be completely commoditized.
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u/SethDusek5 May 23 '26
You wouldn't take people who called the internet a scam to be serious though would you? I don't understand how me replying to someone who's calling AI a scam is so controversial.
Overvalued != scam
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u/insanelygreat May 23 '26
In this case, it's more a question of whether I'd take them literally. Overstatement begets overstatement in the opposite direction. They said AI was a scam, but they also gave a low but non-zero number for what they thought could be delivered. So I interpreted their assertion as meaning something more subtle like, "the inflated claims about what AI can accomplish are a scam."
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u/billyalt May 22 '26
I swear to God I saw this exact response about NFTs when they were in vogue.
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u/directheated May 22 '26
Scammer that has returned more to shareholders than any other mega cap company ever
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u/techma2019 May 22 '26
Found the guy profiting from all the despair Nvidia is pushing the economy into.
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u/Jacosci May 23 '26
Dunno, mate. Seeing Jensen Huang's mug always sucks the excitement out of anything.
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u/unixmachine May 22 '26
Perhaps some kind of Steam Machine. Last year Nvidia was looking for engineers with experience in Proton and FEX-Emu.
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u/bubblegumpuma May 22 '26
That sounds most like they're cooking something Tegra related, if they're looking at poking into FEX. Nvidia Shield 2, Linux edition? Not-a-Nintendo-Switch? IDK, this is all very, "...okay? Details, anyone?"
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u/zzazzzz May 23 '26
why would they wnt to do that? android has a perfectly mature app ecosystem for tv usage. linux on the other hand does not.
and isnt there still the issue of hdcp being a pain on linux with services like netflix ect?
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u/bubblegumpuma May 23 '26
I'm honestly just throwing shit out there in the absence of any meaningful information. What kind of 'Linux thing' do you think they hypothetically would be working on if they were using a Tegra? Genuine question, I'm not trying to be a sarcastic smartass and I'm interested in people's predictions
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u/ironhaven May 22 '26
Thisarticle is about how Greg Heartman used a framework desktop to run a llm vulnerability scanner.
Jensen is very mad that it was not NVIDIA so he is probably setting up some hardware for a new headline
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u/Literallyapig May 23 '26
copy pasting from my comment in the other post: i think it's not outwordly to believe it's something related to open source. lots of nova and nvk contributors have @nvidia.com emails, which means they're nvidia employees. at worst, that means nvidia is fine with their employees contributing to alternative foss drivers, but at best it means nvidia is actively paying full-time developers to work on these.
this wouldn't be a result of nvidia's gratitude either. think about it this way: they have the utmost interest in supporting linux drivers, since all datacenters run linux, but they're mostly interested in cuda and their other proprietary apis like nvenc, nvdec etc. supporting other things like wayland and open apis isn't really in their best interest, since it mostly pertains to desktop linux and they already said they want to focus on datacenters now. so offloading those to the community would free them from the burden of having to maintain these things themselves (at least they'd have to do maintenance less rigorously). it's similar in parts to what amd does.
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u/Diplo_Advisor May 22 '26
ARM-based chips with Linux support. N1 and N1X. The DGX Spark already run on Linux
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u/rebellioninmypants May 23 '26
Something AI. Something dystopian. Something anti-consumer.
That would be my guess.
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u/esmifra May 22 '26
That they are going to exploit Linux ecosystem to make more money for Nvidia AI products.
If the pc GPU market is no longer interesting enough for Nvidia do care much about it, why would Linux market would even begin to get their interest?
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u/Zebra4776 May 22 '26
Idk. Nvidia has always just worked for me on Linux since the 10 series or so. But if they can improve on that even more then great I guess.
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u/ibeerianhamhock May 22 '26
Yeah Nvidia has worked great on linux ever since linux gaming was great in the first place...which realistically wasn't until valve shook things up.
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u/IngwiePhoenix May 22 '26
They're forking the kernel and making CUDA an integral part, allowing models to not just load via kernel memory allocation on system memory and GPUs, but to also directly invoke syscalls with as little overhead as possible - to speedrun system selfdestruction.
The moment GRUB hands over, a model pops into memory, and AI wakes up.
... yes, I am joking. But, you saw Chrome suck down a whole Gemma quant not too long ago soooo.....
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u/DamnedIfIDiddely May 25 '26
Hint: it's AI. Fucking everything is AI these days. I will eat the insoles of my boots if it's not AI.
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u/JuanAy May 22 '26
No doubt it's something related to AI.
Jensen wants his golden goose to last as long as it can. Nothing else matters until AI can no longer be milked.
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u/LumpyFlint May 22 '26
When did the comments in /r/linux go this room temperature IQ, I expected some interesting takes and it's like /r/technology in here
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u/ibeerianhamhock May 22 '26
Yeah it's pretty easy to just hate on Nvidia, but I do think they've come a long way in linux.
I have an AMD laptop and an Nvidia desktop, both on Bazzite and both are honestly amazing.
I mean other than the fact that AMD laptops have shitty wifi chips that you have to exchange pretty much day one for their driver support. I just wanna say if you think Nvidia is bad on linux, try using a mediatech wifi/bt chip lol.
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u/keremimo May 22 '26
100% AI bullshit.
If you believe they will announce “We fixed Nvidia drivers once and for all, even for hybrid laptops” or something else that people actually desire, you will be very disappointed.
It is AI. It is always AI.
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u/platinummyr May 22 '26
Given how the Jensen Huang computerphile appearance felt, it will essentially just be free marketing for some AI thing.
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u/kornerz May 22 '26
- Here's our new truly open source Linux driver which tops the benchmarks. Written from scratch by AI
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u/Megame50 May 22 '26
Full open-source driver stack?
If Nvidia were to open source a mesa driver I'd eat my hat. And my shoes.
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u/2rad0 May 22 '26
Since nobody knows or cares, I'll go out on a limb and say maybe they will revive 3dfx for computer graphics cards, and lead nvidia to slaughter in the autocomplete slop farms which by the way are looking more like military targets these days than civilian infrastructure.
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u/Stellanora64 May 23 '26
More Nividia engineers working on Nova would be nice, but still unlikely (there's only the one leading the project afaik currently)
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u/sleepingonmoon May 23 '26
Either Red Hat made progress or he's pushing for some kind of Linux AI workstation.
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u/DrollAntic May 23 '26
The end result of partnering with larger corporations is a greater focus on profit at the expense of passion and consumer choices. This isn't good news.
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u/AgarwaenCran May 23 '26
Phoronix just posted a pic with Jensen Huang teasing “exciting things happening on Linux” — what are we expecting?
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u/RumbuncTheRadiant May 24 '26
In a semi-unrelated note.. if one wanted to do numerical methods stuff on commodity PC Linux in C++ these days...
Which CPU / CPU/GPU is the most powerful and/or programmer friendly?
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u/Suvalis May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
The only thing he could say that would get me excited would be an in tree kernel driver. I’m saving my Pennies for an amd card. I hate having to deal with Nvidia kernel akmods.
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u/Jul8 Jun 07 '26
I'd bet this is about their new RTX Spark platform support for Linux, which will be given to and benchmarked by Phoronix. It can also be about the NVIDIA DGX OS, a customized Linux distribution.
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u/_MatVenture_ May 22 '26
What, are they finally good to fix hibernation?
Or is it just more AI garbage incoming?
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u/luckynar May 22 '26
Acording to the track record, high speculative prices for hardware. And maybe... some ads if you use Nvidia drivers.
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u/Derdachss May 22 '26
Am I the only one thinking about something related to the upcoming N1/N1x cpus? Linux support from day one, maybe?
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May 23 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/Derdachss May 23 '26
If I remember correctly the first leak we had was a benchmark result of these chips recorded from Ubuntu.
The chances are there.
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u/bloodguard May 22 '26
I'm guessing more of the same. They'll crow about their allegedly open source driver that just so happens to need all manner of mysterious closed source binary blobs to almost (but not quite) work.
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u/AtomicTaco13 May 22 '26
Nvidia only cares about the AI/CUDA part of Linux support. After all, pretty much every LLM runs on Linux. If data centers used Windows to host AI, the machines wouldn't handle it.
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u/play_minecraft_wot May 23 '26
Actually some decent support perhaps? Nah, probably just more ai slop
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u/yyg-linux May 22 '26
they're going to make nvidia drivers even more proprietary and difficult to install.
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u/AnomalyNexus May 22 '26
Comments seem overly negative imo.
Sure they don't have a great record, but I'm all for positive linux x nvidia things anyway. Let's at least hear what they're talking about before judging...
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u/sequential_doom May 22 '26
Some AI garbage probably.