It’s the ol’ spectre of Capitalism come to haunt the market again. Nvidia’s support has always been an afterthought, and given the relatively small share of Linux gamers, “good enough” has been their level of investment.

I forget when AMD went open source, but I think it was that move that has brought them up to competing (surpassing?) with Nvidia in the Linux space. Not only is the support better, but they were able to secure a hold on Steam Deck sales, and with Linux gaming improving as a result of upstreamed fixes, now they’re becoming the better option for people who want to dump Windows but still play games (Nvidia even leeches off those improvements and ports them into their own code).

If Nvidia would go open source, the Linux community wouldn’t have to reverse-engineer everything re: Nouveau and NVK, and they might be a stronger competitor again.