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.”
> Checks title > Checks community name
We just had a flashpoint, right?
Top posts on this sub are currently about discord and nvidia…
Thanks to Nvidia, we have more tech waste than we’re supposed to.
This is dedicate to some specific tasks, we’ll all probably continue to use online chat bots
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.
No, they’re not, and I wish people would stop repeating this. If you want to do anything in userspace, it’s still proprietary, Nouveau, or NVK, the second of which has never been comparable and the third of which is still in development (though showing a lot of promise). What is basically at feature parity is the kernel drivers, which if the author had read their source, they’d already know. Kernelspace ≠ Userspace.
However, I will agree that even with the proprietary driver, most people will have a comparable experience to anyone with an AMD card. Hell, I can even use my old laptop with an integrated 960M to play the same games it has always been able to play. Linux has become more available to more people than ever, and it’s only going to continue to get better.
As someone who doesn’t follow this stuff closely, I appreciate the clarification!
Its nice to hear from someone with more hands on experience. Hope you have a good one :)
Yes, Microsoft now offers Windows on ARM (WoA). However, WoA is not a first-class citizen in the Windows world. Many Windows programs won’t run natively on WoA […]. In particular, Windows games run poorly on ARM.
Interesting news! Sadly I imagine Windows games on Linux on ARM won’t perform any better than on WoA. But maybe this will be more incentive for game developers to ship ARM builds.
Running x86 games under Rosetta on Apple Silicon has been super playable for me, both Intel Mac binaries and Windows games under WINE. So I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible on Linux or Windows, assuming they spend enough time and care writing the translation layer.
Valve is developing an ARM translation layer like Wine.
Wine Is Not an Emulator.
It would be great if there were a way to translate x86 binaries for ARM without emulation. Has Valve found some way to do that? From a bit of searching I see they’ve been testing games on ARM, and that testing involves a version of Proton/Wine that runs on ARM. But it looks to me like they’re testing with ARM binaries for those games?
I’m as enthusiastic as anyone about more Linux usage, and I agree that Linux support for ARM is a good selling point. But the reason Linux works so well on ARM is that we use all this open-source software that anyone can compile for ARM. I don’t think it’s honest to point to closed-source software that we can’t recompile, and imply that it will work better on Linux because other software runs natively on ARM on Linux.
It would be great if there were a way to translate x86 binaries for ARM without emulation
That’s called “emulation”.
Can’t speak for any other distro but android’s winulator (under the hood wine and box64/86) runs pretty well
From what I’ve seen of Asahi Linux’s progress on emulation, Windows games are running pretty darn well on Apple Silicon - there’s still work to be done, but a lot of recent, complicated stuff is playable.
This gives a bit of hope for gaming on other ARM platforms.
Sure would be nice to not have to prepend my programs with prime-run in order to use the dedicated GPU on laptops.
That’s certainly a cool thought!
