Wherein "death watch" is expected to work without difficulty for the next decade or longer.
They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released.
While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years.
We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about using your massive 2% marketshare to strong arm the other. You could afford to be more humble and less entitled.
It really doesn't matter to me if Nvidia drops out of the linux desktop market or not. I've never owned their hardware and never will, so it makes not an iota of difference to me.
I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that's going to happen.
Unless Nvidia decides to support the new system, they can't plausibly claim to support the linux desktop. I just hope whatever happens will result in less online whining from linux-using Nvidia customers.
I think having a substantial chunk of potential machines no longer work would be a meaningful difference to the overall actual and potential user base regardless of how you feel personally. I think we should therefore act in everyone's interests.
Who's going to put up the money? Not Redhat, they don't want to pay for it anymore. Will the nvidia users? Will they be willing to pay for their card twice? Will Nvidia pay for the continued development of X, when they already seem to loath spending money on linux?
If nobody picks up the slack, the paths ahead seems pretty clear. Either Nvidia produces a proper driver, or their support for the Linux desktop can be classified as legacy at best. Feeling upset about this situation doesn't change the nature of it.
This is exactly the kind of reasoning that has always stood in the way of real people using Linux. It makes me sad that we've come a really long way towards taking that mindset out of the OS and we seem to be moving back to it again.
You may not like my reasoning, but how is my reasoning wrong? Somebody needs to pick up the slack now that Redhat has no interest in funding X. All you're doing is protesting that you don't appreciate this situation, but that's irrelevant.
It doesn't matter who the ones "suffering" are. What do you expect to do, convince me of the moral necessity of supporting nvidia cards so that I turn back time and devote my life to reverse engineering GPUs and implementing FOSS drivers? That can't happen. I don't have the power to support nvidia cards, only Nvidia has that power, and they seem to have no interest in exercising it. It doesn't matter if you convince me that nvidia card support is more important that curing child cancer; the situation remains unchanged. To change the situation you must convince nvidia, complaining to anybody else about it is a waste of your time.
The point I was trying to make is that your end users are fundamentally the ones suffering. You are not suffering, because you avoid the problem by throwing money at it. Nvidia is not suffering, because you as a community don't matter to their wallet.
The only people who suffer are the people we write software for. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, because you write software only for people like you. That's fair. It matters to me though.
