@nixCraft My system is all open source software, right up until you hit my Steam installation, but that's because I'm using an AMD GPU, which doesn't require closed-source drivers.
I'm fine with closed source games. That's how the gaming industry works, but I'll never accept the idiotic shenanigans of Nvidia.
Nvidia doesn't support open standards and they actively fight against them, because their ultimate goal is total control of the GPU industry, rather than fairly competing in it.
@nixCraft unless your objective is gaming on Linux, and I mean really gaming, like playing the latest games every day, the latest updates make Nouveau powerful enough
I can be pragmatic in many cases, use stuff which works - prefer FOSS when there are real alternatives.
But nvidia ... They deliberately try to get a free pass in #foss with their proprietary driver. The "open source" Linux kernel driver you get from them is essentially just a firmware loader ... Which tries to circumvent the limitations internal GPL export restricted functions have, inside that binary blob.
And that, dear friends, is one of the reasons this driver can make your system end up in crashes ... When it tries to access restricted functions using an expected interface, where an internal kernel interface may have changed sufficiently with a kernel update to break unexpected users of it.
Drivers doing the right thing, typically don't end up in this mess ... Because they use properly public exposed APIs which has a different guarantee to stability. So if that driver is a proper GPL licenced driver, it has access to all the GPL tagged functions in the kernel directly and doesn't need to do this wonky stuff.
And that's why #nvidia deserves to be completely ignored by #Linux users. They deliberately try to access kernel functionality in particularly restricted from their driver - because it's not a proper GPL driver.
#amdgpu's might not be equally good compared to what nvidia can do. But at least, there are real open sourced, GPL based drivers for them.
@nixCraft Never understood the hate Nvidia gets on this, I've used their drivers for more than a decade at this point (I need CUDA for work) and I never had an issue with updates or performance, used multiple GPUs at this point and not once was a source of problems