I just went from the open source Nouveau drivers to the closed source one a few days ago.
My CPU was literally running hotter from the radiated heat from the GPU due to the driver not doing something right.
Things seem to be cooler with the official driver. Anybody else seeing this?
Linus claims to be pragmatic. So I'm a little surprised he went off like this on Nvidia on a point of idealogical purity. It's actually not clear to me what his complaint against Nvidia not publishing their GPU specs is. Nvidia has pretty consistently updated their drivers, so personally I don't care that they're not open source.
The pragmatic and technical tradeoff is essentially that the proprietary drivers interact well with the GPU but don't interact well with the rest of the linux ecosystem (they are significantly more crash-prone, have many quirks which can't be fixed and need to be hacked around, and generally do their own thing instead of using established APIs), while the open source drivers interact well with the other software in the ecosystem but don't interact well with the GPU (such as the power management issues you mention, as well as lower performance). How big these problems are varies greatly from person to person and machine to machine.
The proprietary drivers likely won't ever interact well with the ecosystem due to their closed-source nature (although the situation could certainly be improved), while the open-source drivers could do better talking to the GPU if they had specifications and not just reverse-engineered info.
As far as I understand, there is basically zero support for power-saving modes in Nouveau. Thus, it's continually running at full speed, and so is heating up.
My CPU was literally running hotter from the radiated heat from the GPU due to the driver not doing something right.
Things seem to be cooler with the official driver. Anybody else seeing this?
Linus claims to be pragmatic. So I'm a little surprised he went off like this on Nvidia on a point of idealogical purity. It's actually not clear to me what his complaint against Nvidia not publishing their GPU specs is. Nvidia has pretty consistently updated their drivers, so personally I don't care that they're not open source.