Comment by gf000
Well, amd drivers sucked a whole lot (fglrx anyone?) before AMD made them open-source. And on every other front it's the same, as basically every other manufacturer. There is no such thing as open hardware.
Well, amd drivers sucked a whole lot (fglrx anyone?) before AMD made them open-source. And on every other front it's the same, as basically every other manufacturer. There is no such thing as open hardware.
I agree with you on principle.
But at the same time (adding more shades of color), part of the reason why Nvidia remained closed source for longer was precisely because they were supporting all the same features on both windows and Linux, while amd's Linux was (is?) always lagging behind. For ML use cases basically the only choice was Nvidia.
(Nonetheless, I was very happy with my amd card, and now I'm very happy with a semi-modern Nvidia card)
I have used fglrx for a very long time, and have some adventures with it. I even knew people from the development team, actually.
Well, having a driver agnostic closed source firmware is pretty different from an end-to-end closed chain with a driver-authenticating firmware.
Also, while fglrx had some serious problems, they didn't wait two years to fix DVI DPMS issues like the green company.
Yes, neither are open hardware at the end of the day, but we have almost infinite number of colors and infinite shades of gray. Like everything else, this is a spectrum.
As I aforementioned, I'd love to have completely free hardware, but the world's reality works differently for many right and many wrong reasons. I'd prefer to use most open one I can get, in this case.