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The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

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Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#351

Post by atemerev »

arendtio wrote: post #44
atemerev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there is only one CUDA, and OpenCL is not an alternative.

Yes, I know :-/ I am not sure what the status of AMD ROCm is, but I guess it will take a while until it becomes a viable alternative.

I'd be happy to say "hurrah!" and close the page, but it is also not an alternative :(

Here is the FFT example in ROCm: https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HCC-Example-Applicat...

Compared to FFT in CUDA: https://github.com/drufat/cuda-examples/blob/master/cuda/fft...

1163 vs 216 lines of code! CUDA is really straightforward; ROCm is still low-level and incomprehensible (unless you are a C++ expert who happens to love low-level details).

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#352

Post by dTal »

Shelnutt2 wrote: post #253
dTal wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusing to run if a particular kernel module is loaded (even if you don't touch it at all) is overstepping. You should at least provide an override flag.

There is an override flag, its linked in the code snippet. Use "--unsupported-gpu" or "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" to bypass the check and allow sway to launch.

Ah, er, jolly good then. Carry on.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#353

Post by ggreer »

darkpuma wrote: post #343
ggreer wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short time I worked at Red Hat (as part of the CoreOS acquisition), several of the redhatters in Raleigh mentioned how much they enjoyed working at Red Hat and how much they hated previous jobs at IBM. This was before the IBM purchase was announced. I predict a mass exodus as golden handcuffs come off and employees start to chafe under new management.

Where do you think they'll go? Canonical? Or will their man-hours be lost to the FOSS community?

Wherever they go, I doubt most of them will continue to work on open source software.

I'm not sure if it's a bad thing that these man-hours will be lost to the open source community. I think Red Hat’s involvement in open source has been double edged. Yes, they have funded projects that are crucial to the open source ecosystem, but their main source of revenue is support contracts. That means they have different incentives from most of the users of their software. If a big customer wants some feature, Red Hat tries to add it as fast as they can. If a big customer doesn't want to change their software to use new versions of some dependencies, Red Hat keeps a fork around and applies security patches. These behaviors serve to increase complexity and technical debt while also causing more headaches for maintainers of upstream software. It's very frustrating to have someone say, "I have a bug with your tool." and it turns out they're on an ancient version of libxml that has a bunch of custom patches applied.

Also, Red Hat wants to upsell people onto RHEL, which means shoving RHEL into places it doesn’t belong. I ended up quitting because I was tired of pushing back on boneheaded technical decisions made in the service of these incentives.

I don't mean to single out Red Hat. It's just the company that showed me how the sausage is made. I think these criticisms can apply to any company that develops open source software with the goal of making money from support.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#354

Post by chrisseaton »

chungy wrote: post #302
llukas wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you want to grow Linux market share if you say FU to a significant part of the potential market? Steam hardware survey is pretty clear about AMD:Nvidia GPU ratio.

Steam is a pretty niche userbase and not at all representative of the desktop market at large.

I don't think so - I see nobody with a desktop computer these days except gamers or people running CAD or modelling who are basically doing the same thing as running a game.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#355

Post by darkpuma »

chrisseaton wrote: post #254
imtringued wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very condescending to label Intel, AMD and pretty much every other GPU vendor other than Nvidia as nothing.

If Nvidia don't support it, then it's just a standard, not the standard.

Meanwhile X is still on death watch and Nvidia will be brought into the fold or be forced to stop pretending they support the linux desktop.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#356

Post by llukas »

chungy wrote: post #302
llukas wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you want to grow Linux market share if you say FU to a significant part of the potential market? Steam hardware survey is pretty clear about AMD:Nvidia GPU ratio.

Steam is a pretty niche userbase and not at all representative of the desktop market at large.

The same can be said about Linux desktop share. Should we draw the same conclusions?

Except gaming is not that "niche":

1.35 billion PCs worldwide - https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-persona...

47M active daily and 90M monthly users for steam https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-use...

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#357

Post by csande17 »

ekc wrote: post #294
Keyframe wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discrete GPU market share is 80%+ Nvidia, last time I checked.

Discrete GPUs are a write-off of a minority of the total market, last I checked.

So are desktop Linux users who don't use GNOME or KDE, if we're honest with ourselves

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#358

Post by imtringued »

atemerev wrote: post #31
daenney wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME, which is what powers the RedHat desktop, supports nvidia on Wayland just fine, and KDE got nvidia/EGLStreams support since KWin 5.16. So at least 2 major DEs do, though quite a few others don't, and have taken a principled stand not to (Sway for example won't). When it comes to RedHat though, they're all-in on GNOME anyway so keeping X around for nvidia users isn't really a concern for them when their desktop…

No, just checked it with the latest Fedora 30, it defaults to X when it detects an Nvidia card.

Fedora 30 still uses 5.15. Archlinux had 5.16 for 3 weeks already.

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#359

Post by imtringued »

fortran77 wrote: post #77
arendtio wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I wouldn't bother if Nvidia would go out of business, as I find it disgusting how they ignore consumer wishes since ages. I mean, in the past I have bought GPU hardware from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel but for a Linux desktop, the experience has been so much better when not using Nvidia, that I try to avoid their products nowadays. This won't help current owners of Nvidia hardware (as myself), but you shouldn't…

They don’t ignore consumer wishes. They have the best GPGPU toolchain around. That’s why I only use NVIDIA. Nobody supports developers for High-Performance GPU computing like they do. They also support PC gamers very well.

Does that tool chain require a desktop environment?

Re: The death watch for the X Window System has probably started

#360

Post by jcranmer »

csande17 wrote: post #334
arghwhat wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution. NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA. Nothing in wayland is…

> NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA. If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? You could write your compositor that talks to the hardware using your "sane" interface, and someone else could write a compositor that uses th…

> It's only because of Wayland's design that "GPU manufacturer creates nonstandard interface to their driver" is some giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community.

That's not how I think of it. By analogy, consider POSIX. Every major operating system supports the POSIX interface--all of them, except one that is. But no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community."

Essentially, you have to pick a point somewhere in the stack where you define the common interface between the different hardware vendors. The problem is that one hardware vendor, because it's the 800 lb. gorilla who loves throwing its weight around, decided to not implement the common interface, hoping that its weight will force everyone else to adapt. Wayland is unfortunate enough to be in a position where it relies on that common interface being supported, but this isn't the only place that NVidia has decided to try to scuttle cross-vendor compatibility (GPGPU computing is a very notorious case).

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