I’m currently leading a petition among scientific microscope suppliers to stop writing software in Windows and adopt a single version of Linux. I doubt they will do it because Windows issues drive most of their service visits.
Where can one sign this petition? I have a few microscopes to purchase this year as the ones we currently have are only supported on Windows 7 😢
Working on the final draft, we will get directors and manager of facilities worldwide to sign, then setup a working group on what the best version of linux is best. For now, we have disconnected all devices from the internet because we cannot afford the downtime from some garbage Win11 update because Microsoft has no responsibility to users.
I have scopes working great with windows 7 and air-gapped.
nvidia shat on Linux for decades, always a piece of shit company, that lucked into the current state of economy.
Every flag is pure red, haven’t bought anything from them ever, and won’t ever buy any streaming service from anyone.
Please do not support this race to the bottom. The bottom will hurt us all.
This company has singlehandedly put the world’s economies in danger and folks still buy their shit. Incredible.
What’s the alternative? AMD is doing the same exact thing, their CEO is even related to Nvidias CEO. That only leaves Intel GPUs, which have a pretty shitty Linux driver, and Intel is not exactly an angel either
True. Nvidia is not the problem, the system is. If it wasn’t nvidia, it would be any other company.
- Step 1: Produce fewer graphics cards
- Step 2: Add Linux support to GeforceNow
- Step 3: ?
- Step 4: Profit
you forgot:
- add monthly limit to Geforce NOW
Fuck Nvidia. Had I known how shit their drivers were for Linux, I wouldn’t have bought a 3080 right after the pandemic.
Jack up prices so people cant buy video cards anymore.
“Generously” make their overpriced, heavily restricted, nickel-and-dimed streaming platform available on functionally everything.
as end users age out of cards, the only options they’ll have left is to use GeForce Now or not play at all.
A long term plan to take your PC from ownership to subscription model.
Or you know, buy an AMD card…
Someone missed the news about AMD planning on increasing prices monthly all this year.
Or Intel, though i dunno how good their cards work on Linux
Not amazing, and Intel are currently cutting costs left and right (including abandoning parts of their Linux work). Hopefully they at least keep some developers working on their drivers.
Pretty awful, from what I’ve heard, and PCIe passthrough into VMs is a nightmare for Intel cards as well. Again, no experience myself, but from everything I’ve read it appears to go AMD > NVIDIA >> Intel as far as Linux support for dGPUs is concerned.
According to Linus Tech Tips vs. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux uses Intel graphics card.
Torvalds is the worst person to use as an example for an ordinary Linux user. That LTT computer was built for one thing only, to develop the Linux kernel and not to game.
Linus doesn’t waste his time playing games. That dude gets real things done.
These motherslapping sons of goats, that refused to support open drivers for their paying Linux customers will now generously allow said customers to rent the gaming experience instead? How nice of them.
Boooooooooooooooo!
I hope they lose a ton of money. Their greed resulting in this push for subscription based models makes me immune to buying anything from them ever again.
Wait, a monthly gaming cap?
Piss right off with that garbage.
I’m sure they’ll also harvest the fuck out of all your in-game behavioral data. Imagine the experiments you could run.
We already know what they are doing with it. They showed off that generic all purpose visual based bot.
So you can’t rent a bot to play a game while you rent the game time.
I had an epiphany with this GFN push.
Nvidia H100s/B200s, what they mostly make for AI, can’t game.
But, they also repurpose some 4090/5090 silicon as budget “inference” AI cards, like the L40 and such.
My observation is that these “inference” cards aged like milk. No business wants them at scale, they’re just crap at running big MoEs, to the extent that Nvidia was doling out contracts like “Okay, if you buy this many H100s you have to take some L40s too”.
They have piles of these “low end” AI cards no one wants, so what do they do? Use them for game streaming.
Not trying to defend Nvidia’s predatory practices, but this does make a lot of sense. They’re essentially overstocked with cloud-only gaming GPUs already.
This isn’t a bad theory. Just to add some color, one of these “low-end” cards goes for $7500 USD right now. I certainly want one but not for a penny over 2k
If you can make a useful MoE thing where each expert model has a small final layer in its neural net, so you don’t need to move much data between cards, then running each MoE on a different card might be viable. Regardless of whether the GPU vendor wants to segment up the gaming and AI markets.
I think that that’s one of the biggest unknowns as to where AI may wind up going. If you can get good results on gaming cards, then suddenly ordinary gaming hardware, run in parallel, may be quite capable of running the important models, and it’s going to be much harder for OpenAI or similar to obtain much of a barrier to entry. That may have dramatic impact on who has what degree of access to AI.
Kinda already done:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07866
Huawei’s model splits the experts into 8 groups, routed so that each group always has the same number of experts active. This means that (on an 8 NPU server) intercommunication is minimized and the load is balanced.
There’s another big MoE (ERNIE? Don’t quote me) that ships with native 2-bit QAT, too. It’s basically explicitly made to cram into 8 gaming GPUs.
If you can get good results on gaming cards, then suddenly ordinary gaming hardware, run in parallel, may be quite capable of running the important models
I mean. I can run GLM 4.6 350B at 7 tokens/sec on a single 3090 + Ryzen CPU. With modest token convergence compared to the full model. Most can run GLM air and replace base tier ChatGPT.
Some businesses are already serving models split across cheap GPUs. It can be done, but its not turnkey like it is for NVLink HBM cards.
Honestly the only thing keeping OpenAI in place is name recognition, a timing lead, SEO/convenience and… hype. Basically inertia + anticompetitiveness. The tech to displace them is there, it’s just inaccessible and unknown.
Yeah that makes a fuck ton of sense imo.
We have all this inventory, it isn’t moving, we need to hit delusional profit margins, how do we do that?
Yep, massive revamp/expansion of streaming game rendering as a service is a pretty solid answer to that question.
Yeah. They’re like aging potatoes in a barn they need to use for something, and its an “answer” to the gaming GPU shortage without reallocating any silicon supply.
I’m actually glad to hear this. Means more reasons for people to move over to Linux.
Not a fan of the service, but more big names in Linux is good for the rest of us. Some of those people moving over are going to be bringing their Steam libraries over and realizing how much better Linux is for gaming.
More adoption from big companies will likely make these big e-sports games reconsider making their anti-cheat compatible with Linux which is essentially the last hurtle to get people off of Windows.
I skipped a game or two of League of Legends last night because I didn’t want to reboot into Windows. Played some Rocket League instead.
Exactly. And we need more linux support anywhere we can!
Unofficially works now.
WAYLAND_DISPLAY="" flatpak run com.nvidia.geforcenow.Isnt there just a bunch of ads in that app anyway? Does it have any features besides installing drivers?
It’s their cloud streaming platform. I prefer to use Sunshine/Moonlight but there’s a case for people with weak hardware and those that aren’t technically inclined. Partly it helps with a problem that Nvidia itself created (siphoning up silicon for AI so upgrades become too expensive).
I use GeForce Now for like 1 month a year or when they have a really good deal on a 6 month like a game I want
