Ya. I think it's clear this is going to take... About 60 more articles before I even have a system that can work, without further justification. Look, if you want the simple straightforward answer, you should just follow a guide that tells you which keys to type and type them. The fact that you are here, and now, reading this means you crave more than that. And maybe this is going to take quite a bit longer to get to any sort of reasonable setup. That. Is. Fine. It is also fine if, you want to take a break and go back to windows for a bit play some guild wars two. Grease the wheels of industry with your blood and fat, in the endless conflict of the mists. It's ok. I'm not going to judge. I can feel the headache already. Don't worry. I'll be here when you get back. (author leaves to do as described, probably) Ok so you are back now? Cool. To my view it feels like device manufacturers have active hostility to the idea of open source. They begrudgingly create drivers for Linux because there are just too many people who wish to use their hardware on that platform for CUDA processing and such. For users who don't find themselves thinking about building rendering farms or doing research computation on a daily basis, like... Gamers and people less casual, the conversation I feel is a bit different. Well gamers are a pretty annoying bunch, tbh, caring about graphical fidelity, And screen tearing, as the most important thing. Device manufacturers I don't think give half a shit about any of that stuff. Maybe I'm wrong (i'm not tho) Gamers simply are not a large demographic for hardware purchases. They buy maybe one graphics card in five years. Not a huge number tbh. This doesn't need to be the incentivizing factor that it /is/ but here we are. Now as far as research is concerned, there might be some good reasons for keeping things closed source, that is if you are a money grubbing capitalist intent on shooting human progress in the knee so you can have all the boats, or something. Personally I think the hardware platforms might see all kinds of improvements at accelerated rates if the "Secret sauce" were made public. Also we could fuckin have graphics drivers on Linux that don't have rending issues constantly (i do blame x for most of this tho because x is fuckin awful) So the debate on Linux when it comes to graphics tends to go down the road, use NVidia and use the proprietary driver because every other option is gay. This might be true. But I'm ok with being gay. The thing is I do like being able to actually use the hardware I have, you know for stuff I want to use it for. I don't actually trust that the proprietary drivers will deliver on that promise however, but MESA isn't really likely to get me there either. In the interest of actually having something working I think we are going to go with MESA, unless someone (please) can provide any kind of alternative basically at all. For those who don't know what it is, it's like an open source implementation of OpenGL or something. I don't fuckin know. It's not really super relevant at this stage, because the stage where it will matter more is basically - let's implement Vulcan ourselves or something. Looking at the schedule of events, I'd say that article should be in about 50 years or so. I don't fuckin know. Graphics are hard, and the fact that the device manufacturers essentially want to keep it as close to a black box as possible is utterly distressing to me. This problem is much more pressing to me, because it makes for an unknowable moving target that is always bound to have problems. The only way to solve this is to institute change at their end and since I don't have force of will to restructure reality (yet) the best we can do is just kinda shitty, so as long as we are tabling shit, I may as well stick to the principle of being able to at least read the damn code that's on the machine, if I ever feel like it. So apparently intel has completely opensource graphics drivers. And AMD has two different version, one of which is open source (why both...?) if I could magically swap out my graphics cards with intel ones, maybe that'd be an option, but my GTX 1080s are already real. And I kinda like them? Maybe? Idk. It might be worth considering. Performance wise, I'm not sure how "Real" the gains NVidia has, is it all magic coding? Do they do nonsense with neural networks and that's all it is? No one knows. I'ma guess yes. Because if it was anything else I'm guessing there'd be no reason to keep their mouths shut at this point. .