OK, maybe you wouldn’t pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?
Besides, why not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family? Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn’t. It’s that simple.
Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers.
Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, “Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work.”
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Man, I completely forgot about that. That’s honestly wild to think about in retrospect…
It’s not. It had nothing to do with it. Nvidia was all in with Linux as soon as they realized their hardware could be used for data processing and AI. That realization was way more than a decade ago.
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They only open sourced the kernel drivers, which just makes sense for them to do. Userspace drivers, which these attackers wanted to be open, are still very much closed. Likely had nothing to do with it.
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That’s true, but its still not nvidia making that, so it’s a bit of a different thing. It will never support certain things like CUDA. It is really cool though and wouldve never happened without the open kernel modules.
Don’t know about “always.” In recent years, like the past 10 years, definitely. But I remember a time when Nvidia was the only reasonable recommendation for a graphics card on Linux, because Radeon was so bad. This was before Wayland, and probably even before AMD bought ATI. And it was certainly long before the amdgpu drivers existed.
Yeah it was before AMD did graphics.
ATI had an atrocious closed source driver. I used it … but it was not good at much of anything.
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Nvidia was “forced” to integrate Linux into its ecosystem
100% bullcrap.
Nvidia’s servers for data processing have always run Linux. And you know what those servers run? It’s not Windows, that’s for sure. So why would they write multiple versions of a driver for the same hardware interface? Their servers use the same drivers that you would use for gaming on a Linux desktop system.
In fact, no version of Windows is supported on their DGX servers, and AFAIK you can’t even install Windows on it (even if you managed, it wouldn’t be usable).
Long story short, a vendor we were working with (about 6 or 7 years ago now), was working on their Linux version of their SDK. We wanted to do some preliminary testing on Nvidia’s new T4s that at this point were only available via Nvidia’s testing datacenter (which we had access to).
During a call with some of the Nvidia engineers I had to ask the awkward question of “any chance there’s a Windows server we can test on?”. I knew it was a cringe question and I died a little during the 10 second silence until one of the Nvidia guys finally replied with “no one uses Windows for this stuff”. And he said it slowly like the reply to such a question needed to go slow to be understood, because who else would ask that question unless you’re slow in the head?
Nvidia has always been hostile to the Linux community or negligent to say the least
People say “hostile”, but I think a better word is arrogant. They wanted to force the industry to use their own implementations they owned or pioneered like egl-stream instead of open standards. But AMD and Intel have proven that open source graphics drivers not only work, but benefit from being open so that the community can scratch their own itches and fix issues faster.
Yep, Nvidia has never been hostile towards Linux, they benefit from supporting it. They just don’t care to support the desktop that much, and frankly neither do AMD or Intel. They often take an extremely long time to fix simple bugs that only effect desktop usage. Fortunately, in their case, the drivers can be fixed by other open source contributors.
Am I missing something here? Nvidia never caved to their demands IIRC
Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn’t.
And why is that?
Project DIGITS features the new NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, offering a petaflop of AI computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning and running large AI models.
With the Grace Blackwell architecture, enterprises and researchers can prototype, fine-tune and test models on local Project DIGITS systems running Linux-based NVIDIA DGX OS, and then deploy them seamlessly on NVIDIA DGX Cloud™, accelerated cloud instances or data center infrastructure.
Oh, because it’s not a fucking consumer product. It’s for enterprises that need a cheap supercomputer
NVCC is still proprietary and full of telemetry. You cannot build CUDA without it.
*monkey paw closes*
But it’s just for AI bullshit.
I don’t care why they got their shit together, I’m happy as long as they fix the open source drivers.
Where’s the PC? Is it the brick on the desk? 🤣
But… Why make it so ugly?
I actually think it looks neat.
The mock-up looks much cooler than the actual device in the photo (assuming that’s actually it and not just a render or something).
The one in the photo looks like they cobbled it together from an old cardboard box.
Yeah and stuck a bunch of gold glitter on it with Elmer’s glue.
Well, it’s still a modified custom distro and other distros will need to invest extra effort to be able to run there. So, no actual freedom of choice for users again…
Not true. You can run other distros, but it won’t be ready to go without a decent amount of work.
thats…literally what they just said.
They said there is no freedom of choice. You are free to choose any distro you want. HW mfgs aren’t under obligation to provide inbox support for niche markets.
Folks, I think we got a bot here thats just spewing pre-prepared lines, regardless of how irrelevant the comment is.
Versus someone that doesn’t understand the market segment this is meant for. People using it for training don’t care about the distro or gfx drivers. It’s an appliance.
Don’t get too excited – if this goes like the last few NVidia hardware, it will:
- cost too much
- run a non-mainline kernel
- NVidia will discontinue support for it after 3 months
Go talk to all the Jetson owners out there and see how happy they are with NVidia Linux boxes. I’ll believe it when I see it (and when it is supported for longer than a quarter)
I hope to see some nice Risc-V PCs soon
Or you can just buy any random potato computer (or assemble it yourself from stuff you found) and still run Linux on it.
I fucking wish you could filter out words like “Linux” on Lemmy so I don’t have to hear it anymore. I avoid Linux out of spite to all the Linux bros
Stay mad
Not mad, mildly annoyed. Does the billionaire who owns Linux allow you to get off his dick so you can defend them online?
Is that a joke or do you genuinely not know what linux is? I get being annoyed by it if computers aren’t your thing though.
That’s kind of the funniest way to not know what it is, though.
Lill Lates is a good billionaire, builds schools and shit.
You can, at least in voyager. Go to settings and then filters & blocks. There, you’ll find that you can add keywords to filter.
You can, it was one of the first things I did, blocked politics
Haha
I’m planning on getting new pc soon. I was planning on avoiding nvidia because i had read it might be more difficult to get drivers. Does this mean they are going to improve things in general or just for the newest and likely most expensive stuff? I dont want to buy the newest possible gpu since they always have bloated price for being new and a bit older ones are likely decent enough too.
Modern nvidia GPUs work great, like rtx 900 and newer
The main problem are nvidia legacy cards where nvidia isn’t updating their proprietary drivers and isn’t making them open source which leads to the decision to go with nuveau on newer kernels which has less features and uses more power, but is wayland compatible.
Nvidia drivers on Linux are messy and have been for a long time. It took them ages to fix Vsync in Wayland. If you want to run Linux, go AMD (or Intel).
I was planning on getting some amd gpu. Are there any other components that might have similar issues? I want to build this pc specificially for linux
Not really, everything else should just work. At least if you don’t plan to buy an obscure USB sound card or something like that 😄
Have fun!
Haven’t they been making things like the Jetson AGX for years? I guess this is an announcement of the next generation.
It’s a pile of shit compared to any other sbc. It’s difficult to develop or run anything because it has an arm chip
But arm is the most deployed microprocessor in the world? I’d much rather write arm assembly than Intel or PowerPC. For higher level languages, arm has good compiler support. Can you explain why you don’t like arm? I’m genuinely curious because it is probably my favorite development environment (I mostly write embedded system software).
It is an horrible ecosystem that could very well end the era of the personnal computer. I type this on an arm device which I cannot ever be root on. Arm has been the biggest rollback in user freedom since windows 10.
Linux packages don’t work on it unless they’re custom compiled, OS is supplied by Nvidia unless you make or compile your own os, so support for these will be abandoned when the next one comes out. Minimal performance for the price in exchange for lower power consumption. Really only useful for image recognition for OEMs for automated factory quality inspection, robotics, etc. where Internet access is limited.
The AGX that I use has Ubuntu 22.04 lts. I have been able to update it with apt. For us, it has been a good environment for CUDA. We run a rust application that uses c++ cuda image processing on the back end. Sorry people are downvoting you.
Not Acer. I’ve been burnt by them too much in the past.
Cant load the article. Does it mention if this will be ARM computers?
