Some time later after everyone started working on and using that new interface, nVidia popped up saying they were supporting a different interface (EGLStreams). nVidia was invited to those discussions where that decision was made, said they'd be there, then was a no-show. There have been occasions like where Intel, AMD, the kernel devs, Mesa, and Wayland were in unanimous agreement on a new interface for Wayland's graphics management (GBM). Let's not forget Linus' infamous "nVidia, fuck you" middle finger, which was born as a result of nVidia's drivers creating many unnecessary issues and headaches for the kernel devs, amplified by the drivers being closed and nVidia not working with them like the other vendors do. Sure their drivers may have been been relatively good since the outset, but this created a schism the open source open source drivers were continually improving, and AMD and Intel would work with the Linux Kernel, Mesa, Xorg, and later Wayland, to fix problems and work out details for future development, while nVidia would stay in its own corner expecting others to do what they wanted. nVidia, in contrast, steadfast refused to provide any documentation or make any moves to having or allowing open source drivers, going business-as-usual. This resulted in AMD graphics seeing regular improvements in stability and quality too. AMD followed suit, providing documentation for their hardware and working with the kernel devs and Mesa for writing new open source drivers. This resulted in Intel graphics seeing a significant jump in stability and quality over time. Times change, and at some point Intel decided to open source their drivers and provide documentation for their devices, working with the kernel devs and Mesa on their now-open-source drivers. However, not everything stays the same forever. People would happily focus their efforts on making sure their stuff worked with nVidia because it was the only way it could work well (if you wanted 3D acceleration, at least), and its behavior was roughly comparable as on Windows. Consequently, nVidia drivers performed far better with comparatively few issues. ATI, later AMD, developed separate (closed source) drivers largely from the ground up for Linux, and were much buggier and lacking features compared to their Windows offerings. ![]() This provided a more consistent level of quality and features across OSs. nVidia decided to make their Linux drivers use the same core code as their Windows drivers, with a little open source glue to interface a binary blob with the kernel and X. Back in the before times, there were no open source drivers for nVidia, ATI, or Intel hardware that could do 3D acceleration. Most people have been openly thankful to nVidia for providing Linux users with good quality drivers as they used to be the only ones to do so. NVidia has had superior closed-source Linux drivers for many years, and while there's always a lot of ideological controversy around them, everyone is secretly thankful to NVidia for providing Linux gamers with good-quality drivers that typically will work out of the box. Open-source drivers are by no means 'automatically better' than closed-source ones.
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