NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

Very interesting, thanks for the perspective. I suspect all the recent loss of face they experienced with the transition to Wayland happening around the time that this motivation evaporated also probably plays a part too though.

I swore off ever again buying Nvidia, or any laptops that come with Nvidia, after all this. Maybe in 10 years they'll have managed to right the brand perceptions of people like myself.

Just download it to your pc. It is better user experience and costs less

I am not using Wayland and I do not have any intention to use it, therefore I do not care for any problems caused by Wayland not supporting NVIDIA and demanding that NVIDIA must support Wayland.

I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers.

On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers).

The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly.

Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.

Having as open-source all the kernel, more precisely all the privileged code, is much more important for security than having as open-source all the firmware of the peripheral devices.

Any closed-source privileged code cannot be audited and it may contain either intentional backdoors, or, more likely, bugs that can cause various undesirable effects, like crashes or privilege escalation.

On the other hand, in a properly designed modern computer any bad firmware of a peripheral device cannot have a worse effect than making that peripheral unusable.

The kernel should take care, e.g. by using the I/O MMU, that the peripheral cannot access anything where it could do damage, like the DRAM not assigned to it or the non-volatile memory (e.g. SSDs) or the network interfaces for communicating with external parties.

Even when the peripheral is so important as the display, a crash in its firmware would have no effect if the kernel had reserved some key combination to reset the GPU (while I am not aware of such a useful feature in Linux, its effect can frequently be achieved by switching, e.g. with Alt+F1, to a virtual console and then back to the GUI, the saving and restoring of the GPU state together with the switching of the video modes being enough to clear some corruption caused by a buggy GPU driver or a buggy mouse or keyboard driver).

In conclusion, making the NVIDIA kernel driver as open source does not deserve to have its importance minimized. It is an important contribution to a more secure OS kernel.

The only closed-source firmware that must be feared is that which comes from the CPU manufacturer, e.g. from Intel, AMD, Apple or Qualcomm.

All such firmware currently includes various features for remote management that are not publicly documented, so you can never be sure if they can be properly disabled, especially when the remote management can be done wirelessly, like through the WiFi interface of the Intel laptop CPUs, so you cannot interpose an external firewall to filter the network traffic of any "magic" packets.

A paranoid laptop user can circumvent the lack of control over the firmware blobs from the CPU manufacturer by disconnecting the internal antennas and using an external cheap and small single-board computer for all wired and wireless network access, which must run a firewall with tight rules. Such a SBC should be chosen among those for which complete hardware documentation is provided, i.e. including its schematics.

The biggest chunk of that "extra work" would be installing Linux in the first place, given that almost everything comes with Windows out of the box. An additional "sudo apt install nvidia-drivers" isn't going to stop anyone who already got that far.