alt Hacker NewsThe Maxwell architecture is 12 years old. Like, I'm not out here defending NVIDIA's Linux drivers, but I also think it's unreasonable to expect great support for extremely complicated hardware that's over a decade old.
I've personally had zero issues with NVIDIA on Linux on both Turing (20xx) and Blackwell (50xx).
I agree that it’s an old, outdated, and obsolete architecture... but it is perfectly well-preserved and meets my current and future needs. I look at it like a car or a motorcycle; it might be 10 years old and lack an ADAS safety system or a giant touchscreen, but it’s still functional—in other words, I get to choose when to replace it.
The problem with NVIDIA is that its driver is an incredibly delicate component of its GPUs. With each new generation, the company implements—via software, through micro-routines—features that it failed to deliver in the hardware itself. If the driver were open—meaning one that the community could develop and maintain—I could continue using my GPU without any issues. Intel and AMD support the Mesa graphics stack, with full functionality. Why doesn’t NVIDIA?