NVIDIA has replied to the recent comments made by Linus Torvalds about the lack of support to Linux by NVIDIA.

While attending a forum hosted in Finland, on June 14, Torvalds spilled out his distaste for the lack of support of Linux by NVIDIA. He said that even though NVIDIA gained huge profits just by making chips for the Android phone market (a vast majority of Android phones have NVIDIA ‘chipping in’), NVIDIA is very bad at providing support for the graphics cards of desktop users of Linux; and he flipped the bird.

NVIDIA, which replied to Torvalds’ comment, made note of the same point Torvalds’ made; that they (NVIDIA) are active participants in the Android market by supplying ARM chips (which are alternative to the Intel x86 architecture, which runs desktops and laptops). The issue however, is Torvalds complained about was not NVIDIA’s Android support but rather that NVIDIA are just using Linux for their own gains, while not providing support for the father of Android system — Linux. I personally believe that NVIDIA failed to make a point there aside from stoking their ego.

However, NVIDIA also mentions in its latest press release that NVIDIA does actually provide proprietary Linux drivers for certain graphics cards, including the latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla hardware for both desktops and notebooks. But, some users have found that in some cases, the default drivers provided by the Linux community turn out to be better than these proprietary drivers.

Furthermore, NVIDIA sugar coated their reply with a bit of ego. NVIDIA said that they support Linux as far as they have to and think that the support is already enough; and that NVIDIA uses “NVIDIA common code” as opposed to “Linux common infrastructure” for the purposes of “consistent GPU experience for our [their] customers”:

“While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.”, NVIDIA said in its statement.

It is now up to Linux users to now decide whether the reply by NVIDIA is really worth accepting or criticizing. Too bad more curse words weren’t involved. Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

[via Wired]