Linus Torvalds lashes out at Nvidia

Linus Torvalds lashed out at Nvidia during an interview with Finnish students. The Linux guru described Nvidia as “the most horrible company we’ve dealt with,” while the firm would take advantage of Android.

Torvalds, who is known for his not always subtle statements, was asked about Nvidia’s support for the Linux operating system during an interview with students at the Finnish Aalto University. The questioner had a laptop with Nvidia’s Optimus technology, but did not receive any support from the hardware manufacturer. Also, there would be no open source drivers available that can take advantage of the power-saving Optimus technology within Linux.

According to Torvalds, the Linux community has major issues with Nvidia in terms of hardware support. The Linux guru, who recently received an award for his work, even described the company in no uncertain terms and gestures as “the most horrible company we’ve dealt with.”

Torvalds went on to say that Nvidia was the exception to the rule. In addition, he calls Nvidia’s attitude towards Linux strange, because the company serves the rapidly growing Android market with its Tegra SOCs and knows how to make money from it. However, Torvalds doesn’t expect Nvidia to change its behavior anytime soon. “We can’t help it, it’s part of life.”

Although Nvidia releases proprietary drivers for Linux, which many end users consider to be of better quality than AMD’s closed-source Catalyst drivers, the company does not support projects to develop open source drivers. As a result, for example, the Nouveau developers are forced to develop drivers themselves through reverse engineering, while AMD does offer support in building drivers for its GPUs and APUs.