Describing kernel panics and general nightmare scenarios as the general course with Nvidia doesn’t make sense either.
Nvidia has 80% market share of the discrete GPU desktop market and at least 90% market share of cloud/datacenter.
Nvidia GPUs are used almost exclusively for every cloud powered AI service and to train virtually every ML model in existence. Almost always on Linux.
Do you really think any of this would be possible if what you are describing was anything approaching the typical experience starting at the /driver/ level?
Nvidia would have never achieved their market dominance nor held on to it this long if the issues you’ve experienced impacted anything approaching a statistically significant number of users or applications.
Nvidia gets a lot of hate on HN and elsewhere (much of it fair) but I will never understand the people who claim it doesn’t work and get the job done (often very well).
People use flakey software all their time. As long as it mostly works most of the time most people put up with it. Examples: Windows in the 90’s and 00’s, or any AAA game on first release in the last 10 years.
I have a friend at the Facebook AI Research lab and I assure you they would not tolerate any level of fundamental flakiness from their 8,000 GPU cluster. Talent, opportunity cost, and time to market in general is so crucial in AI no one has any time or patience for the "oddball Linux desktop" experiences people are describing here.
Gaming users may tolerate some flakiness for their hobby but these AI companies dealing in the nine-figure range (minimum) absolutely do not.
My guess is when FB does run into such flakiness they email ____.____@nvidia.com as part of some support contract they have and go "Yo, we see this issue, figure it out and fix it".
But I can promise you after reading things like the LKML for decades and a number of different Microsoft blogs, that everyone on this planet experiences flakiness issues at times and has to figure out how to adjust their workload to avoid it until the issue is discovered and fixed.
He has described to me, in detail, some of the challenges they have had. I'm not saying it's exhaustive but I'm pretty sure if their experience with the fundamental software stack was what people here are claiming I would never hear the end of it.
Actually, no. Obviously they have Nvidia support but in one especially obscure issue he was describing Meta took it as an internal challenge and put three teams on it in competition. Naturally his team won (of course) ;).
Of course all software has flakiness - I'm not taking the ridiculous position that Nvidia is the first company in history to deliver perfect anything.
What I am saying is these anecdotal reports (primarily from Linux desktop hobbyists/enthusiasts) of "It's broken, it doesn't work. Nvidia sucks because it locked up my patched kernel ABC with Wayland XYZ on my bleeding edge rolling release and blah blah blah" (or whatever) are extreme edge cases and in no way representative of 99% of the Nvidia customer base and use cases.
Show me anything (I don't care what it is) and I'll find someone who has a horror story about it. Nvidia gets a lot of heat from the Linux desktop situation over the years and some people clearly hold an irrational hatred and grudge.
Nvidia isn't perfect but it's very hard to argue they don't deliver generally working solutions - actually best of breed in their space as demonstrated by their overwhelmingly dominant market share I highlighted originally.
On the flip side, one of the reasons I'm loyal to nvidia is a combination of two things.
1. They supported linux when no one else did,
2. I've never experienced instability from their drivers, and as I mentioned before, I've been running their cards under linux since the TNT2 days.
Your statement makes no sense. It's like a smoker claiming that since he didn't die of lung cancer, smoke is 100% safe.