Basically: "We only care about keeping a checkbox next to 'linux support' in our feature grid. We don't care about how shitty the experience is for linux users"
There could be a number of reasons for what Nvidia is choosing to do here. I've worked for a company that provided a kernel module separately (though, it was all GPL). There were a number of reasons for this:
* The architecture of our driver did not fit with the subsystem we were playing in (this was a SCSI module). We worked with the package maintainers, and without a near complete re-write of our code, it would not have been accepted.
* Part of the above design was cause by cross-platform code we had (parts of the driver was shared between Windows, Linux, AIX, others).
* When supporting customers that run older version of a distro, there would be no-way to give them the latest features if the code was part of the kernel. So our latest product offerings would be incompatible with older systems. We would have been at the mercy of RedHat and SUSE to backport our drivers into their older releases. (or would have had to pay them a lot of money to do it).
We had a driver that basically started development in 1997 or so, that there was no-way we were going to rewrite it just to get it into the linux kernel.
For us, it was just way cheaper to supply the drivers outside of the kernel.
> For us, it was just way cheaper to supply the drivers outside of the kernel.
While that's certainly fair enough, and rational in economic terms, when a user base reads between the lines that "you're not worth spending the money to do things properly", I can also see it eliciting a more visceral and less rational response such as Linus'. I think that in any case though, money isn't the issue so much as Nvidia wanting to not share their toys.
I agree, they get points for not trying to hide the fact that Linus is right.
Unfortunately, "Yeah, so what?" is not the kind of PR you want here. This was an opportunity to go "Yes, that's how it is now, but in the future, we're planning on supporting all this wonderful stuff on Linux!"
Instead, it's an advertisement for ATI/AMD's Linux support.
Although I think it's better they say this upfront than take an opportunity to lie to the community if there is no plan to support Linux properly in the future.
If you mean the ATI proprietary drivers, I can believe that nVidia's suck slightly less. However, the majority of Radeon cards have full 2D/3D support in Open Source drivers (and those drivers actually have developers from ATI working on them), whereas the reverse-engineered nouveau driver supports a smaller subset of nVidia cards with much lower 3D support (and no support from nVidia whatsoever).
So, I'd still take ATI over nVidia due to ATI's much better Open Source drivers with some development done by ATI, though I'd take Intel over ATI for having entirely Open Source drivers with much more direct development from Intel.
I guess different people had different experiences. My nVidia cards have worked just fine on Linux but my HD7750 ATI card does not work properly (random screen flashes and poor rendering) on Ubuntu no matter which driver I try.
It is refreshingly blunt, i'll give them that.