May 14
NVIDIA Officially Open Sources It’s Driver Modules For Linux!
This is probably the biggest news for Linux users. NVIDIA was perhaps one of the most significant drawbacks of Linux. But… It isn’t anymore
Just a decade ago, NVIDIA was having one of the best graphic drivers in the Linux market. All the good drivers(almost) were closed source where NV had a fairly easy process to install the proprietary driver. AMD and Intel on the other had some painful processes to have the drivers working well.
As time passed by, AMD and Intel kept improving and finally open-sourced their drivers, allowing us to integrate the drivers into the operating system. But, NVIDIA did not do so and stayed in the same place. This has continued to the “late” present, where everything has moved on except Nvidia. BUT things are gonna change from now.
What Happened?
I’m not gonna dive deep into the technical aspects as you can have a look at that above.
Linked above is the article about Nvidia’s decision, that it’s gonna open source the drivers, which means we are probably gonna have:-
- forks of drivers
- better integration with the os
- Features that the community desires (since anyone can apply merge to the repo), which even the company likes (since they approve them).
I mean… NVIDIA is one of the most “proprietary” companies out there. Decisions like this are a huge surprise to everyone.
BUT, Here’s The Sad Part
It’s too late… Yeah… It might seem like I’m dragging this a bit too much, but it’s the truth. AMD has not only had a good reputation in Linux, but it has also managed to integrate VERY well with all the Linux distros.
Since NVIDIA is going to be open source now, it’s going to take years of effort to give a good competition to AMD in the Linux world. Not to mention integrating it completely with the kernel itself.
So yeah… Hopefully, this has been helpful to you guys, I’ll post more stuff and news on this and more on Twitter, and also videos on tech, dev, design, and editing on my YouTube channel. Thank you so much for reading this, I’ll meet you in the next article.
