Published at LXer:

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has called out NVIDIA for their poor graphics drivers in a public presentation. In the talk he called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended his green comments with "NVIDIA: F*** YOU!"..

Read More...

Way to go Linus. Alienate the company that, in my experience, has consistently provided the best video drivers for linux, with childish drama.

How much do you know about what nVidia does in the background, fogpipe?

As an end user you might not care about the shenanigans that nVidia is prone to. Linus, however, does give a damn about it.

Personally if I ran Nvidia I would say screw Linux, not like it would cost them that much to lose the whooping 2% market share.

Linus is almost as bad as Stallman, he is always ranting about something.

Debian sucks, KDE sucks, Gnome sucks, Nvidia suck, etc.

A bit of point missing going on here I feel. Firstly, as pointed out, Linus' issue isn't with end user experience where the end user doesn't mind about binary blobs. His issue is how Nvidia's lack of co-operation directly impacts the kernel and X.org development.

Also, the whole 2% market share thing is yet again a red herring. Don't think that just because we're mainly talking about GPUs that we're only talking about home desktop. How about this?

Given that, I think it's worth keeping the pressure up on Nvidia as much as we can as a community and as individuals. (For me, their facebook page seemed a good place to start.)

If the kernel and X.org devs didn't break the API with every new version it wouldn't be a problem. Same thing happens with AMD/ATI, new Xorg or kernel come out and poof fglrx doesn't work. And who gets blamed? Not the kernel or Xorg devs but AMD.

Even using the 'free' radeon driver I lost X for half the day when this last version of Xorg hit Debian sid. The fix? For some strange reason I had to install xserver-xorg-video-ati even though xserver-xorg-video-radeon had been working for the past two years with no problems.

OH look X broke let's blame nvidia/amd/intel etc.

Anyone that has been running Linux for a number of years will understand what I am talking about.

Perhaps, however nobody is forcing you to run the latest bleeding edge version of the kernel or Xorg.
I'm running Slackware 13.1 with kernel 2.6.33.x (2 years old...) and don't have any complaints, and will make sure that my target upgrade will work with the fglrx drivers *before* upgrading my distro (if I upgrade at all).

Part of the problem you describe has to do with this never ending upgrade treadmill some users seem to be on, and for no reason at all really (understandable if you're using a rolling realease distro like Arch, though).

EDIT: many distros (such as Debian *cough*) mess around with the packages they make, a lot more than they probably should. Distros like Slackware give you the software the upstream developers intended you to have.
I've experienced a lot fewer problems that turn out to be distro-specific since I started using Slackware. I don't want to start a distro war here, just pointing out my own observations...

Say that to people with Optimus configuration.

Uhm, 2% of NVidia's market share is a huge amount of market share.