# NVIDIA and FreeBSD



## lyuts (Feb 2, 2009)

Hi, guys. Just want to know your answers to the following questions.

1. Who of you have both, Windows and FreeBSD on the same machine and have NVIDIA card on it?
2. Why do you think NVIDIA writes drivers for FreeBSD?

Any answer will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.


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## hydra (Feb 2, 2009)

1. count me in
2. no idea... because some requests regarding the drivers were popped in and nvidia wants to have a good name ?


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## randux (Feb 2, 2009)

1. Not me, I'm windowless except for VM guests that I absolutely have to have for work, damn them 

2. don't know, but after Winbloze and Linux, FreeBSD is probably the most popular desktop OS.


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## Djn (Feb 2, 2009)

1) I do.
2) Not sure, but I expect it's not _that_ much work to maintain a FreeBSD version when they've already got their linux and solaris drivers.


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 2, 2009)

> 2. don't know, but after Winbloze and Linux, FreeBSD is probably the most popular desktop OS.



Yes, I believe FreeBSD has a whole .01% of the market share! woohoooo!
And Linux, it has a whole .8%! Oh wow, they're big!

MacOS by the way has 10%, and is 100 times bigger than FreeBSD and Linux combined on the desktop market.

The nVidia driver is partially open source, and the closed-source part is mostly platform-independent.
Most of the work on the FreeBSD nvidia driver wasn't done by nVidia but by a volunteer (FreeBSD committer IIRC, don't remember the name), after that it wasn't that much trouble for nVidia to keep it up to date.
The Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD nVidia driver has only one fulltime/serious developer (zander), I guess he has enough time left to keep the FreeBSD driver working.


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## Djn (Feb 2, 2009)

Aah, statistics. Let's just say I would be careful about stating a random number with sub-percent accuracy as fact when the variation in the observations is so large as in this case. 

Still, yes - linux is small and FreeBSD tiny as a desktop OS. I suspect the people using them have a larger than average interest and influence on IT matters, though - pleasing them (ok, "us") could be worth more than the market share would suggest.


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## randux (Feb 3, 2009)

LOL I'd rather run FreeBSD than Windows+MacOS, so add me to the .08% or whatever it is


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## none (Feb 6, 2009)

1. I do.
2. Why not ?

none


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