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1 year agoI’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly? With AMD, the 3D acceleration driver is bundled directly into VESA, so it’s already ready & working before even the first-boot of almost all desktop distros. That’s how drivers are supposed to work on Linux and it has taken NVIDIA 10+ years (and counting…) to get with the basic program.
I applaud the long overdue decision to move their proprietary firmware directly onto the card and making the rest of the kernel driver open-source, but I’ll remind you folks of a few things:
- The open source driver is still in an alpha with no timeline for a stable release
- NVIDIA has so far elected to control their own driver releases instead of incorporating 3D acceleration support into VESA
NVIDIA had to be dragged screaming to go this far and they’re still not up to scratch. There’s still plenty of fuel left in the “Fuck NVIDIA” gastank.
You may be interested in reading this post about the process of packaging Steam.
tl;dr: It’s mostly an annoyance reserved for packagers to deal with. Dynamically linked executables can be patched in a fairly universal fashion to work without FHS, so that’s the go-to approach. If the executable is statically linked, the package may have to ship a source patch instead. If the executable is statically linked & close-source, the packagers are forced to resort to simulating an FHS environment via chroot.