[_nist]

Consumer harm = selling their graphics cards at outrageous prices by keeping supply low and reducing the OS support for them by making Linux drivers crap.

Then again, it never "required" consumer harm as far as I've read.

[JumpCrisscross]

> making Linux drivers crap

This has zero consumer harm since an insignificant fraction of consumers use Linux.

The harm is in their control of both chip making and e.g. CUDA. The analogy would be Intel refusing to license 8086 and x86 to AMD [1].

[1] https://itigic.com/x86-on-intel-and-amd-why-cant-anyone-else...

[cowpig]

Isn't this reasoning circular?

How would a significant fraction of consumers use Linux if it's not supported by a monopolist?

edit: also, is the premise even true? Are these compute farms really running windows?

[righthand]

This is not true and very ignorant. Linux has huge marketshare especially across server space where NVidia cards are used also. Furthermore plenty of people run Linux desktops that would be affected by this.

Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice. Since Linux isn’t the biggest platform, but a major choice: It is therefor harmful for Nvidia to not support it properly.

Check your bias.

[EnergyAmy]

I would be surprised if more than a small minority of consumers using CUDA ran anything other Linux. I would like it if I wasn't forced to use their crap drivers that force me to use X just because I want to do some ML.

[cududa]

They’re not required to make Linux drivers. They open sourced the stack years ago. Take it up with the driver community.

Second, what? The drivers for AI work loads on Linux are powering massive models right now.

I think what you actually meant is “I don’t understand antitrust laws or really underlying tech and am mad I can’t game on Linux”

[_nist]

I understand antitrust law enough to know that "mad I can't game on Linux" is an anti-competitive measure.

As far as what I read about the driver stack, they only recently (within a year) release source for kernel modules. They did not open source the whole stack. And these are only new modules in an alpha state.

Its basically the bare minimum.

Most people aren't running ML on their workstations and these mostly use entirely different types of cards.

[theyeenzbeanz]

I had to use a bleeding edge live mint ISO yesterday because the regular release ISO gave me a black screen on my 3099z. Nvidia drivers continue to be my #1 Linux paint point aside from windows apps that don’t run on wine due to DRM/anticheats.

[hot_gril]

Why would Nvidia intentionally use monopoly power to give Linux a hard time? You're also free to use AMD or Intel.

[Dalewyn]

That is at best a weak argument because guess what: AMD is competition and also sell at prices outrageous enough that there is no downward pressure.

If anything, I would take Nvidia, AMD, and maybe Intel to court for price fixing their GPUs.

[_nist]

I'm not sure what world you live in, but Nvidia sells their cards at 1.5 - 2 times the price than AMD's on average and AMD has had strong Linux support for years.