> You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card.

Has internet discussion really fallen this low that all needs to be spelled out and no context can ever be implied?

We're in a thread about NVidia, so of course OP's talking about NVidia hardware here. Yeah, they can get AMD, but that does not change their (valid) criticisms of NVidia one bit.

> I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

Aaand?

Windows and macOS have different standard for drivers than many Linux users do. Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too?

I find it really weird to assume that because something is happening somewhere, it's some kind of an "objective fact of reality" that has to be true for everyone, everywhere.

When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it?

It's the same thing. NVidia is not some lonely developer on GitHub hacking during their lunch break on free software.

Do you also assume that the kind of music you find interesting is objectively interesting for everyone?

This has nothing to do with entitlement. It's listing reasons for why someone thinks NVidia buying ARM is a bad idea.

> Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too? When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it?

It is to me. When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed.".

That's exactly how these comments being made sound to me. Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

I have many GFX card from all vendors over the years, and I've had to send one back because the vendor wasn't honest about things like that.

Do I wish nvidia had good open source drivers? Sure. Do I blame nvidia for these not existing, not really. That would be like blaming microsoft or apple for not making all their software open source.

I do however blame vendors that do advertise good open source driver support that ends up being crap.

What does any of this have to do with nvidia buying or not buying arm ? Probably nothing.

What nvidia does with their GFX driver can be as different from what ARM does, as what Microsoft does with Windows and Github.

> When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed."

That's a bad analogy. A better one would be it's like you bought a car, (an open-source operating system) and this one accessory supplier is selling you what are really motorcycle parts, but just about fit the car barely, (a less-than-great proprietary driver when you explicitly are on an open system). Additionally, they are extremely secretive and absolutely refuse to answer any sort of questions or allow you to modify the parts you purchased from them to fit better by implementing various forms of DRM.

You can just not buy those parts and indeed that's what many users are doing.

This is separate from raising concerns about this somewhat dodgy parts manufacturer potentially acquiring another manufacturer, specifically one that does require a lot of cooperation with others by its very nature.

> Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

It's more complex than that. They seem to actively implement features to make it purposely more difficult to develop an independent open-source driver. This is rather different than just being passively indifferent to open-source. Moreover their proprietary driver can be less than seller too, so am not so sure they "deliver" even on that.

Therefore we, Linux users, can refuse to support a company that only supports their (lacking) proprietary driver and certainly we are within our rights to raise concerns about its purchase of ARM given its actively hostile approach to open-source.

I would probably agree with you if everything was modular and commodity and easily swappable. If I decide I won't buy hardware with nvidia in it, that chops out a chunk of the possibly laptops I can have. It means I can't repurpose older hardware; sure, hindsight may be 20/20, but perhaps I didn't have the foresight 7 years ago to realize I'd want to run Linux on something today (yeah, older hardware is better supported, but it's by no means universal). It means that I can't run some things that require CUDA and don't support something like OpenCL.

And you can argue that that still is all fine, and that if you're making a choice to run Linux, then you have to accept trade offs. And I'm sympathetic to that argument.

But you're also trying to say that we're not allowed to be angry at a company that's been hostile to our interests. And that's not a fair thing to require of us. If nvidia perhaps simply didn't care about supporting Linux at all, and just said, with equanimity, "sorry, we're not interested; please use one of our competitors or rely on a possibly-unreliable community-supported, reverse-engineered solution", then maybe it would be sorta ok. But they don't do that. They foist binary blobs on us, provide poor support, promise big things, never deliver, and actively try to force their programming model on the community as a whole, or require that the community do twice the amount of work to support their hardware. That's an abusive relationship.

Open source graphics stack developers have tried their hardest to fit nvidia into the game not because they care about nvidia, but because they care about their users, who may have nvidia hardware for a vast variety of reasons not entirely under their control, and developers want their stuff to work for their users. Open source developers have been treated so poorly by nvidia that they're finally starting to take the extreme step of deciding not to support people with nvidia hardware. I don't think you appreciate what a big deal that is, to be so fed up that you make a conscious choice to leave a double-digit percentage of your users and potential users out in the cold.

> None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

Not sure how that's relevant. Windows and macOS are proprietary platforms. Linux is not, and should not be required to conform to the practices and norms of other platforms.

I don't know why this is downvoted. If any, Nvidia has been providing quality drivers for Linux for decades, and it was the only way to have a decent GPU supported by Linux in the 2000s, as ATI/AMD cards were awful in Linux.