Linus Torvalds thinks that the AI Boom was the main reason for Nvidia to improve their linux drivers
Posted by TheNavyCrow@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 139 comments
stisti129@reddit
grass is green
FluffyWarHampster@reddit
its not a zero sum game, even if AI goes belly up (very unlikely) nvidia has still invested large amounts in their Linux support and that support will still have gone a long way in expanding Nvidia+linux use in Non-ai workloads and that market share will not be easily ignored by a company like nvidia that has shifted so much of their resources to the data center/AI space. Nvidia has essentially put themselves in a position where they have to continue to support linux if they want to maintain market share.
xmBQWugdxjaA@reddit
I want Nvidia to improve their Linux drivers.
*monkey paw curls*
They improve, but you can never afford a GPU.
gianfrixmg@reddit
*RAM
jones_supa@reddit
We are heading into a direction where people will mainly be using only integrated GPUs.
Separate NVIDIA GPU cards will be a luxury item for yuppies in the same way that wavetable MIDI sound cards such as AWE32, GUS and LAPC-I were in the DOS era.
kombiwombi@reddit
It's not like Nvidia don't know this, or even care. Nvidia are building high performance processors and switch fabrics.
The question for Nvidia is how they gain the rest of the processing core, which is more directly competing with AMD and Intel.
ExoticAsparagus333@reddit
Nvidia started making good drivers for linux when they made cuda, basically. When they were just a “graphics card” company, yeah they were shit. But as scientific computing, and cuda exploded, nvidia gpu drivers have been great, so were really looking at the last 15 years at least.
stogie-bear@reddit
CUDA was introduced in 2007. If Nvidia had been serious about Linux drivers for the last 18 years they would be good by now. Hopefully. I don'tt know, maybe they really are just that bad at software.
kansetsupanikku@reddit
But the drivers are good. GNU/Linux is the de facto reference way of running CUDA. And the display works, so you can use NVIDIA display in a workstation for CUDA development. Typically with LTS release of the OS, and containers for development.
Scenarios like "gaming" or "catching up to new display stacks with no delay" are simply not covered by that model.
stogie-bear@reddit
I think that's more true with CUDA than with use as an actual GPU. The compatibility with things like Gamescope and even Wayland is still lacking and Nvidia is pretty far behind in the area of GPUs for Linux gaming.
kansetsupanikku@reddit
Why would they care for Linux gaming? Other than Valve, nobody is investing in that. You can do graphical simulations, and driver is unified, so it also works for some gaming, sure. But I have never seen NVIDIA GPU being advertised for "Linux gaming". This use case scenario is practically off-label.
And "an actual GPU" is exactly what you use with CUDA/ROCm/others in workstations. CUDA is for GPUs - and even if one might dispute that industrial grade computing devices are not "GPUs" anymore, they still get called that in many contexts.
Ursa_Solaris@reddit
"The Linux driver for this graphics processing unit is actually good, except when it comes to processing graphics on Linux" is such a funny position to stake out that I'd almost think it was satire.
zacker150@reddit
I know it's hard for you gamers to understand, but there's a difference between processing graphics and displaying graphics.
The assumption has always been that GPUs in Linux servers will run as headless GPUs.
stogie-bear@reddit
Nvidia sells RTX GPUs for desktop. According to Nvidia, “ Powered by NVIDIA Blackwell, GeForce RTX™ 50 Series GPUs bring game-changing capabilities to gamers and creators.”
zacker150@reddit
Yes. And the assumption is that if you're a gamer or creator, you'll use Windows.
stogie-bear@reddit
As a Linux user I don’t want products that come with that assumption.
zacker150@reddit
Well, unfortunately for you, the open nature of the Linux kernel makes it fundumentally incompatible with anticheat.
The only way you're ever getting Linux gaming is if a company builds a locked down console experience on top of it.
stogie-bear@reddit
I don’t play games with kernel level anti cheat. Most games don’t have it. If I were still using windows I wouldn’t play games with kernel level anti cheat, because allowing kernel level access to shit that doesn’t belong there is a terrible idea.
Ursa_Solaris@reddit
Could you try again, but even more venomous and disrespectful? As both a gamer and sysadmin, I don't feel like you put enough effort into offending me. Try something in the vein of me being a "manchild", throw in a barb about how I'm not far enough along in my career to understand that the only thing that GPUS are good for is running LLMs, stuff like that. That'll probably get your point across and make me listen to you, you just gotta be meaner!
kansetsupanikku@reddit
My research in image processing with experiments CUDA was, sell, graphics processing. You know, the situation where NVIDIA sells you a GPU, NVIDIA provides documentation on CUDA APIs, also support.
Nobody offers you support for "all the scenarios remotely involving graphics processing", such as running Windows games without Windows. In doing so, you might have third-party support from Valve, or even more likely - be on your own.
accelerating_@reddit
Well using a graphics card for graphics is "off label", apparently. I'm glad nobody told AMD and Intel.
__ali1234__@reddit
It's true. Nvidia barely cares about gaming on Windows at this point.
stogie-bear@reddit
By actual GPU I mean a device for processing graphics. GPU is supposed to stand for Graphics Processing Unit. A large percentage of people who buy an Nvidia RTX GPU are buying it because they want a device that is good at generating 3D graphics on screen, which is one of Nvidia's marketing points, and is primarily used for games. When people talk about Nvidia drivers on Linux being bad, that's usually what they're talking about. They've been gaming on Windows and then run Linux and their DX12 game is running 20% slower, because Nvidia is behind on the software side.
A large segment of Linux desktop users now are gamers who want an alternative to Windows and they shouldn't be written off as part of the market.
unixmachine@reddit
Everyone blamed Nvidia for this, but in the end, the real fault lay with Vulkan, as Collabora revealed last month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpwjJdkg2RE
stogie-bear@reddit
It’s there a source for that information that is not a long video? And is the blame relevant to the consumer?
unixmachine@reddit
What do you mean by "source"? The source is Faith Ekstrand herself, from Collabora, talking about this. She's dealing with this directly, since she works on Mesa Driver. If you don't want to watch the video, there's a PDF of the presentation, but I think it lacks a bit of context.
https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/402/attachments/243/327/2025-09-29%20-%20XDC%202025%20-%20Descriptors%20are%20Hard.pdf
stogie-bear@reddit
What I meant was that I was not going to spend 50 minutes watching a video. So thanks for the slides. This tells the technical reasons why Nvidia is slow for Linux gaming. It’s good that somebody is working on it. If they make good progress, maybe nvidia will be an option in the future.
kansetsupanikku@reddit
Show me where does NVIDIA present Linux gaming as their "marketing point"
Ursa_Solaris@reddit
Where do they explicitly say Windows gaming as a marketing point?
kansetsupanikku@reddit
Well there is a list of RTX games. Zero of which have native Linux or FreeBSD builds or compatibility advertised by the studio.
Ursa_Solaris@reddit
Following that logic, Nvidia didn't support playing video games on Windows until 2018. Not sure what they were doing selling gaming cards before that, seems like false advertising to me.
Loads of games on that list have advertised Steam Deck compatibility, and therefore Linux compatibility. Here's one example off the dome. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of others on that list.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2909400/view/538843201121812535
kansetsupanikku@reddit
What can I tell you? NVIDIA marketing materials, as available now, don't discuss gaming before 2008. And I find it sad too, as I love old games.
And for your examples you link to materials by Valve, not by Square Enix. So the promise doesn't come from: the studio (Windows, PS5, NS2 and Xbox), the cooperation of studio with NVIDIA, or from NVIDIA (that would only cover Windows). Proton-related promises come from Valve exclusively.
Ursa_Solaris@reddit
Is this a bit? Are you fucking with me right now?
Valve doesn't write community event or news posts for games. But because I love driving the point home with people who don't listen for the entertainment of everyone watching:
Here's the launch trailer for the game posted to the official Final Fantasy youtube channel, wherein the trailer says both in the description and burned into the video, that it is compatible with Steam Deck. At the end of the video is a Steam Deck logo, just in case you think someone fucked up the text in two locations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4t1OFONu10
Is there anything else you'd like to be wrong about today?
stogie-bear@reddit
I don’t understand this argument. Are you saying that “Nvidia didn’t promise this would work well” is a counter argument to “this doesn’t work well”?
stogie-bear@reddit
Gaming performance is the biggest marketing point for Nvidia consumer GPUs. If it doesn’t game well on Linux, that just shows that Nvidia doesn’t care much about consumer GPUs on Linux and we shouldn’t buy them for that.
ExoticAsparagus333@reddit
A large percentage of people are buying cards for games. But a larger percentage of cards are bought to run a bunch of linear algebra for scientific computing. When my work orders $500k in nvidia gpus (and this is nothing compared to say amazon) thats not for playing games, and thats 100k $500 cards.
kansetsupanikku@reddit
A nice clusters you must have. Regardless, there is a correlation between use and platform. Games are being released for Windows, and to that effect, NVIDIA cooperates with studios to make it work. Due to marginal availability of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD games that would benefit from top GPUs, that effort is... actually slightly greater than justified, I would say.
Odd-Possibility-7435@reddit
AMD has had open source drivers for ages and their drivers still have issues very often. I would argue, the main issue with Nvidia drivers on Linux has been compatibility with kernels as may distros are on older kernels, and people trying to install them from the website like one would on windows as opposed to just bad drivers
unixmachine@reddit
I went in with that mindset and bought an AMD GPU. I regret it because I'm experiencing random freezes almost every day. It's extremely annoying. I never had problems with Nvidia, at most, there were missing features (like video acceleration), but that was much more tolerable than having the system crash. Searching on GitLab, I saw that this bug has persisted for at least 3 years! I'm going to sell my AMD GPU and buy another one from Nvidia.
stogie-bear@reddit
There are issues but AMD's drivers work so much better. AMD using open source for much longer than Nvidia has and cooperating with / contributing to kernel development and Mesa has led to better compatibility and performance.
tjj1055@reddit
yeah im sure everyone enjoys the AMDGPU kernel module breaking things every other kernel update. very reliable and stable, its definitely better than nvidia
Odd-Possibility-7435@reddit
I’m not a fan boy or anything, I use whatever GPU, I just think people dislike Nvidia for the wrong reasons. The GPUs work and the drivers are typically not the problem
wolfannoy@reddit
Their pricing is the only thing I dislike about Nvidia really.
iAmHidingHere@reddit
Do you remember the state of AMD cards in 2007?
stogie-bear@reddit
In 2007 I was on Mac at home and I don't remember what we had at work but it was Windows and we were mostly using CAD, and I wasn't in IT, so I don't really remember the state of drivers back then.
iAmHidingHere@reddit
The Nvidia driver worked far better than anything else.
ahfoo@reddit
Do you understand what ¨signed drivers¨ are?
iAmHidingHere@reddit
Was not really a thing in 2007. Are nvidia even signing their windows driver today?
stogie-bear@reddit
Okay, I don't have reason to doubt that, but in 2025 the AMD driver works better for people who are using their GPU for on screen graphics (e.g. gamers).
iAmHidingHere@reddit
My point was that Nvidia did take a big step forwards 20 years ago, probably due to Cuda. They just happened to be overtaken later. But truth be told, I still use their cards with no issues.
ExoticAsparagus333@reddit
AMD cards were so good, but their drivers were crashtastic from like 05-15. I had a 5870 and windows and linux both I had tons of grey screen crashes.
PraetorRU@reddit
Nvidia drivers were actually really good all those years. X support was solid. It's just Nvidia decided to ignore a switch to Wayland, as gaming didn't bother them, and that became a problem which they are fixing up to this day.
Odd-Possibility-7435@reddit
Exactly, I’ve been using Nvidia on Linux for around this amount of time and the cards worked very well. The main problem was that the kernel devs also had to do work to support the drivers while they remained proprietary and could not just be built into the kernel. I’m sure they were also a pain to deal with for kernel devs as they were surely overly careful not to divulge too much information
deviled-tux@reddit
The problem with their drivers was the distribution model and licensing rather than the technical implementation
lincolnthalles@reddit
It's both.
Their distribution model and licensing prevent third parties from patching things, and the Linux driver model burdens them with more maintenance efforts.
Windows is much more friendly to closed-source drivers as it's designed to have pluggable drivers over a somewhat stable API, not to mention that's where their money used to come from.
Their technical implementation is also subpar on Linux for anything other than CUDA. Their GPUs are still underperforming.
kmlynarski@reddit
And for now, a mini-PC with truly amazing performance under Linux, created for LLM models, runs on... AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and Radeon 8060S GPU :-P ;-)
TheNavyCrow@reddit (OP)
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/linus_torvalds_vibe_coding/
afeverr@reddit
God that is a great title
zacker150@reddit
creamcolouredDog@reddit
They're certainly not doing it from the kindness of their hearts. But then I wonder when the bubble pops, they'll still be contributing to Linux in the same way.
mina86ng@reddit
They’re selling shovels. Even if the bubble pops and many companies go bust, those which remain will still need those shovels.
mnilailt@reddit
Sure, but when the bubble pops shovels are probably not going to be worth 500 bucks, and we shouldn’t need 3 billion of them.
mina86ng@reddit
When dot com bubble burst, the amount of networking infrastructure did not reduce. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen with GPUs/TPUs.
spectrumero@reddit
The amount of new installs did, and other products used by the dotcoms. In the wake of the crash you could buy Sun workstations and servers for pennies. This made it very difficult for Sun to shift new hardware and set the conditions for their eventual demise. If something similar happens with AI, you'll have companies with too much production capacity and almost no one buying new hardware.
Froztnova@reddit
Hmmm, the idea of being able to get my hands on some very high-end GPUs for cheap sounds like a silver lining to an otherwise pretty crap situation.
berryer@reddit
True, but the amount getting built out did. Plenty of fiber laid in the 90s stayed dark for decades until Google Fiber or a municipal provider bought it, or is still dark to this day.
takethecrowpill@reddit
They'll just crash whatever crypto they can mine with them
DrPiwi@reddit
If the bubble pops, the real problem is that these AI companies are at the top of the stockmarket, Nvidia, MS, Meta, Amazon... are the top of the Nasdaq. When that bubble pops the market will crash with far more consequences than the dot com crash, as these are the economy now. This will be more like the Goldman-Sachs crash. And worse.
duva_@reddit
At the same projected volume?
Trotskyist@reddit
I mean even at half of the current volume you still need drivers. Also, even if "the bubble pops" I highly doubt we'll see a decrease in hardware being used. Just, perhaps, less of an increase than expected.
Dialectic-Compiler@reddit
If the bubble were to pop, wouldn't a lot of companies fold, drastically reducing demand and possibly resulting in a glut of used GPUs hitting the market?
spectrumero@reddit
Yes. The dotcom bubble bursting resulted in the same for hardware. When it burst, you could pick up nearly new high end Sun workstations for pennies on the dollar. Of course this meant Sun now had trouble shifting new hardware. (It wasn't just Sun, the bubble popping claimed many other victims too).
While nvidia looks unassailable now, well, so did Sun and a bunch of other hardware companies in 1999. nvidia is only a bubble pop away from starting its decline and eventual fate to be swallowed up by the likes of Oracle.
Dialectic-Compiler@reddit
Man, I really would prefer that this doesn't end with Oracle becoming even bigger. Nvidia sucks, but at least they aren't Oracle.
chocopudding17@reddit
It doesn't even have to be a medium-term increase, let alone a long-term one. People are (correctly, imo) calling it all a bubble. But let's remember that the .com bubble was also a real bubble. But you wouldn't exactly say that web usage dropped in the medium- or long-term after it burst...
Barafu@reddit
Lets remember everyone called aviation a bubble and a craze that will pass and/or needs to be legally banned.
MrHell95@reddit
You could easily have a downturn but a few years of tech improvements and suddenly the new shovels are essentially excavators making the old shovels obsolete. Thus new shovels gain demand and old ones gets replaced. It could potentially hurt the stock but Nvidia as a company will be fine.
Ruck0@reddit
They’re actually investing their money in companies to provide the capital to buy their shovels. A terrifying ouroboros.
WillEatAss4F00d@reddit
when this bubble pops its gonna make the dotcom bubble look small in comparison
Th3casio@reddit
They’re trying to justify the investment with the idea that it’s equivalent to building the railways. But the railways didn’t need to be upgraded every 2-3 years (guessing here) to have the latest hardware.
Albos_Mum@reddit
Hopefully it makes the venture capitalists stay the fuck away from IT for a while.
deadlygaming11@reddit
Yeah. Nvidia was safe, then decided they wanted more money so started investing in their customers (which fuels the bubble) and is now tied to their fate.
LocNesMonster@reddit
And those investments are typically either in the form of loans which must be used on purchases of nvidea chips or are conditional on the purchase of nvidea chips, both of which inflate nvideas stock price
nickcash@reddit
I think ouroboros is the wrong metaphor. a snake eating itself is way too cool and badass
it's more like shitting in their own mouth. a terrifying tubgirl.
Helmic@reddit
a metaphor after ed zitron's own heart
ahfoo@reddit
The metaphor is wrong, they are the goldmine and there was never any gold in the mine. It's just a software scam masquerading as a hardware vendor. You don't buy Nvidia products, you lease them. You are not allowed to own them. They hide behind patent law to prevent that.
Anxiety_Fit@reddit
Did they even say thank you?
deep_chungus@reddit
they'd be dumb not to, first crypto and now ai are running on linux boxes by default, they can soft lock their hardware to windows but the only audience that helps with are gamers and they could give 2 shits about them
InvisibleTextArea@reddit
Everyone gets an Nvidia card for a $1 in compensation.
TheCamazotzian@reddit
They will. Analytical compute will continue to be a bigger market than gaming regardless if AI lives or dies.
Hot_Adhesiveness5602@reddit
If the steam hardware manages to establish itself it might be more common than Windows support at some point.
shogun77777777@reddit
Even if there is a bubble that pops, AI isn’t going anywhere in the long term.
wolfannoy@reddit
I agree, however I think a few things will change some laws. Might catch up to it as well as less corporates being on a rush sacrificing everything for the AI instead. It will be put in the back burner when it comes to development.
What I hope will happen is it will cause less of demand for RAM and GPU. Bring the prices back to ok I hope. And that's a big matter of who knows what happens next.
Synthetic451@reddit
Linus himself has said that he doesn't think people contribute to Linux due to altruism. Instead they contribute because it in turn benefits them. That has always been the case.
SheepHair@reddit
If they're smart they will keep working on Linux, because this shows that if there's a new technology in the future that wants to use nvidia on linux and there's a lot of money to be had with it, then they should want to be ready for that. Plus the fact that more and more people will transition to linux, especially within the following year or so (Windows 10 ESU running out, Steam Machine, Windows 11 continually sucking)
StucklnAWell@reddit
I'm still shifting back over to AMD now, either way. Nvidia has great cards, but AMD just has more of what suits my needs. Linux support and budget mindedness.
Psionikus@reddit
Who is doing any of this from the kindness of their hearts? That was never the ask. The ask was that Nvidia wouldn't cause problems for no benefit, which is often the case when holding software close to our chest while asking others to integrate with it tightly.
Busy_Agency5420@reddit
another reason to like ai.
stone me.
flowingpoint@reddit
20 years ago I was blowing s*** up every chance I got in Driv3r. Now I'm having polite study sessions with gemini at the top of the world, and it doesn't feel the same...
lincolnthalles@reddit
Ofc it was. If it weren't for AI, most likely Nvidia users would still have no Wayland support.
It's not good for marketing and ecosystem building when developers can't have a decent experience with an Nvidia GPU in their own machine.
Not everyone will run things in the cloud and some people must know the hard ways so things don't disappear when people who made it die.
And feature parity and performance are still subpar on Linux. Nvidia has a lot more work to do.
unixmachine@reddit
Nvidia has supported Wayland from the beginning. What happened was that there was a disagreement about how some protocols should be established. At the time, even the Wayland developers didn't have a clear definition. In any case, Wayland only became viable around 2021-22, and Nvidia quickly achieved stability.
Synthetic451@reddit
You don't need a graphical interface to run LLMs. I doubt it was because of AI. Pretty sure its because they saw the writing on the walls that X was dying and that they'd have to do it sooner rather than later.
edman007@reddit
Don't underestimate developer input. You ask for run an AI server farm they are going to tell you that Linux has the tech for that kind of server farm. They'll then use that hardware for development. Much of those APIs are in various graphics libraries.
Ultimately it's the developers telling you what Hardware their AI algorithms work with. So for a chip company it's vitally important that they go and make it work well with every library the developer wants because the developers are going to recommend purchasing whatever works the best with the libraries they choose.
So in the past, the money for GPUs was for games, so they made game libraries work well with GPUs, but now it's servers, so they make server libraries work well with GPUs.
tu_tu_tu@reddit
Wayland will standard defacto for Linux in major commercial distros in near future and Nvidia obviously cares about Linux workstations that use CUDA.
lincolnthalles@reddit
Yeah, but "out of sudden" they started caring a lot more and now "Linux is great", like Jensen said when questioned.
Odd-Possibility-7435@reddit
I don’t know if they wouldn’t have Wayland support tbh. I’m sure they’ve been working on Wayland a while before the AI explosion. For a long time people were complaining about Wayland not working but it was because they were lacking configurations to make it work and the information was less accessible, not that Nvidia hadn’t gotten it to work for the most part
DarlingDaddysMilkers@reddit
Strange even before the A.I hype I found Nvidia to always play nice with my Linux setups. Don’t get me started on Radeon I have no freaking clue how they’re still going.
ahfoo@reddit
It says right there in the quote that Torvalds only cares about the kernel space and doesn't give a fuck about Linx in userspace and because he feels satisfied about their kernel contributions despite the closed drivers he's fine with who they are.
Well that is precisely how Torvalds has remained so politically apathetic since the beginning. He pretends not to notice how patents and signed drivers are used to destroy open source and turn it into a product you license rather than own because he's just the kernel geek and has no political opinions as he is being paid by the tech aristocracy and doesn't feel the pain.
Hey great for him. He's an apolitical engineer and it's none of his business and all he cares about is his own narrow focus. It's a version of "stay in your lane" philosophy. Okay, that's his choice and I admit I depend on him but I think his political apathy is eventually going to bite him in the ass.
Candid_Problem_1244@reddit
On one of his famous talks, he even said that he has never been managed / developed a website because he likes to "program" (the low level one). He even said he didn't know how to put his kernel on a FTP server so anyone can download it.
Obviously he only cared about the kernel space and he didn't really hate companies doing evil thing.
combrade@reddit
Don’t forget Steam , the gaming community and Vulkan .
Nostonica@reddit
Makes sense, when the primary market is gaming, make it work on windows and everything else is a after thought. When it's for massive server farms, get it working perfectly in Linux and throw some weight behind it.
Blu-Blue-Blues@reddit
Yeah I can't disagree with Linus. Having a few trillion dollars might have helped.
7yphon@reddit
I mean, yer. I thought this was a sorta known thing.
alius_stultus@reddit
And theyll drop us like a bad fucking habit as soon as it pops.
theriddick2015@reddit
Well we still need that BIG DX12 RT performance fix that affects many games.
kalzEOS@reddit
Whatever it is, I'm glad they're doing it, and I'll still never buy an Nvidia GPU.
stef_eda@reddit
They had to. Hyperscalers do not use AmigaOS or WIndows or BeOS or MacOS.
LiquidPoint@reddit
Nvidias Jetpack SDK is based upon Ubuntu LTS... why would anyone think it's not?
unknhawk@reddit
Maybe NVidia involvement will increase even more if the steam machine will have success.
SOUINnnn@reddit
Isn't the steam machine using an amd gpu?
unknhawk@reddit
Yep. If it will be received well, gaming on linux will become a bigger market share, which could have more attractive on Nvidia investment.
nailizarb@reddit
Famously not true 3 years ago, actually
deadlyrepost@reddit
I think he means the fame of his middle finger (though that was in 2012).
IrrerPolterer@reddit
Its not far fetched. Pretty obvious honestly
mitch_feaster@reddit
Obligatory
So Nvidia, f*#k you 🖕
• Linus Torvalds
https://youtu.be/Q4SWxWIOVBM
(I'm stoked to hear that they're changing, but the video above is an all time top Torvalds moment and it warms my heart each time I watch it)
tapafon@reddit
Linux was one of reasons why I chose AMD. While NVIDIA is now good with drivers, AMD was (and is) historically better.
Patient_Sink@reddit
This was not the case back when ATI made the cards though. The fglrx driver was hideous.
Spiritual-Mechanic-4@reddit
They could have made CUDA and compute support and left actual graphics pipelines behind
a smaller, but I think important, factor is 'cloud edge gaming' and such. The infra providers for game stream need graphics pipelines in datacenters, and they sure as fuck weren't gonna try to deploy huge fleets of windows to do it
IngsocInnerParty@reddit
Interesting that the AI (slop) boom is also pushing people away from Windows to Linux.
Lord_Of_Millipedes@reddit
before LLMs the main market for GPUs was gaming and personal computers, now that servers are needing good GPUs and with the big majority of servers being Linux, Nvidia doesn't want to lose the market, they're obviously not doing it because they suddenly care
T8ert0t@reddit
Briefly, crypto mining as well.
stormdelta@reddit
They were being used for machine learning and mass parallel data processing long before LLMs.
Alan_Reddit_M@reddit
Can't argue with Torvalds
edparadox@reddit
Nvidia started making a good proprietary driver for GPGPU, and they kept ramping up slowly.
Liarus_@reddit
Of course it's because of AI, i don't see Nvidia doing such a thing without any clear financial motivator
Michaeli_Starky@reddit
Full heartedly agree with Mr. Torvalds
Samiassa@reddit
I could totally see that honestly. No one’s running ai on windows so they really had to if they wanted to be THE ai company (which they obviously do)
Negative_Settings@reddit
And he would be right they said as much too
chedder@reddit
it very obviously was their primary motivator.
RoosterUnique3062@reddit
Nvidia was already invested in Linux before the AI boom, so like always Travolds is full of shit.