I agree, if it weren't for the fact that they give zero shits about Wayland support. I'd be totally fine with them staying closed source as long as they kept up with the standards.
What are you talking about? Wayland is supported on DEs that wanted to support nVidia chips.
Meanwhile projects like Sway have a direct "Go to hell if you use nVidia, we won't let you run this code." It's bizarre that you blame nVidia for this.
It's possible to create a Wayland compositor that works with the proprietary nVidia drivers, but it requires using nVidia-specific interfaces because nVidia refuses to support the same interfaces for non-GLX, non-X11 hardware acceleration provided by every other Linux graphics driver.
It's hardly surprising that a lot of Wayland compositor developers would rather not put in a ton of extra effort to add a special case for one particular set of proprietary drivers, which they would then need to maintain and support separately from the common code path.
To tell the whole story, the NVIDIA argument is that they want cross platform standard interfaces (EGLStream), which would use the same code the Windows driver uses, but the Linux world is pushing for Linux-only interfaces (EGL)
That may be, but the fact remains that nVidia is pushing an interface that no other Linux drivers currently support, for reasons that really only benefit them. The Linux kernel team has never been particularly supportive of middleware layers designed to promote common drivers between Linux and other operating systems, and for good reason—it impedes the development of optimized, native Linux drivers.
The only way I see nVidia succeeding here is if they clearly demonstrate that EGLStreams is a technically superior alternative to GBM, not just for their own hardware but in general, and also contribute the changes needed to support EGLStreams for all the other graphics drivers currently using GBM so that applications don't need to deal with both systems. As long as the EGLStreams code path can only be exercised in combination with the proprietary nVidia drivers it will remain a second-class citizen and projects would be well-advised to avoid it. (Drew DeVault goes into more detail[1] in his objection to the inclusion of EGLStreams support in KWin, which I agree with 100%.)
Or they could just acknowledge that this is a Linux driver, not a Windows driver, and implement the standard Linux GBM interfaces like everyone else even if that means less shared code.
It’s “””supported”””. It’s apparently very buggy and very difficult to debug. Sway lets you run it after you set a flag making it very clear that if something is broken you may not report a bug since the developers are unable to reasonably fix it.
Most Linux distro will also prevent you submitting a bug report for a kernel issue if you have a tainted kernel.
