I'm on the same boat, however, it's a bit unclear if parent is complaining [also] about their open source support. Their antagonistic position towards open source (AFAIK there's no comparison to AMD<>Nvidia open source drives) is a big issue for me.

> about their open source support.

Which support?

They have an official closed-source driver. That's what they support.

Parent is complaining that when they run an unsupported third-party driver, it doesn't work as well as the actually supported driver.

I think these distinctions are important, becaues NVIDIA is not telling anyone that they have (1) an open source driver, and (2) that this driver is well supported.

Their supported driver works great.

OTOH AMD does have an open-source driver that they support. In my experience, this driver works much worse than NVIDIA's proprietary driver. You can't use AMD GPUs for compute, etc.

At the end what this means is that users currently have to make a choice. Do you want a GPU driver that works well, or a GPU driver that's open source?

I don't like to have to make this choice, and every individual weight these values differently.

> I think these distinctions are important, becaues NVIDIA is not telling anyone that they have (1) an open source driver, and (2) that this driver is well supported.

this is not correct. this is an extract from an nvidia presentation:

> We'll report up-to-the-minute developments on NVIDIA's status and activities, and possibly (depending on last-minute developments) a few future plans and directions, regarding our contributions to Linux kernel; supporting Nouveau (the open source kernel driver for NVIDIA GPUs, that is in the Linux kernel), including signed firmware behavior, documentation, and patches; and NVIDIA kernel drivers.

Now, even putting this aside, the situation is not so black-and-white.

I wasn't able to boot Ubuntu with my latest Nvidia card. The closed-source driver can work perfectly, but it doesn't boot a Ubuntu image. I don't remember the details, but I think rebuilding the image with closed-source drivers didn't produce a functioning system, and if memory serves me well, I had to go as far as booting with another card.

Therefore, a closed-source only approach does actively damage the open source world in a concrete way.

Second, the nv driver story (obfuscating the code) is really deplorable, and there's no excuse for being explicitly antagonistic.

All in all, I think that being fiercely closed-source (they'd be good friends with the GNOME devs...) in a open source world, can't avoid doing concrete damage.

> this is an extract from an nvidia presentation:

Where do they say that they provide official support for Nouveau ?

They contribute patches to it. They contribute patches to a lot of open source projects. There is a big difference between contributing a patch, and "officially supporting" a project.

The driver you are using is a BLOB that comes from closed source. Many people who use Linux are against that, and would rather have open source drivers (which I think nvidia used to have but discontinued?).