They care when it affects their bottom line, and customers leaving for the competition does that.

I don't know if that's what's happening here, honestly, but you're right that they don't care about being shamed, but building a reputation of being hard to work with and target, especially in a growing market like Linux (still tiny, but growing nonetheless, and becoming significantly more important in the areas where non-gaming GPU use is concerned) can start to erode sales and B2B relationships, and the latter particularly if you make the programmers and PMs hate using your products.

> customers leaving for the competition does that

What competition?

I do agree that companies don’t really care for public sentiment as long as business is going as usual. Nvidia is printing money with their data center hardware [1] where half of their yearly revenue comes from.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

> in a growing market like Linux

Isn't Linux 80% of their market? ML et al is 80% of their sales, and ~99% of that is Linux.

True, although note that the Linux market itself is increasing in size due to ML. Maybe "increasingly dominant market" is a better phrase here.

Hah, good point. The OP was pedantically correct. The implication in "growing market share" is that "market share" is small, but that's definitely reading between the lines!

Right, and that's where most of their growth is.

Having products that require a bunch of extra work due to proprietary drivers, especially when their competitors don't require that work, is not good.

The biggest chunk of that "extra work" would be installing Linux in the first place, given that almost everything comes with Windows out of the box. An additional "sudo apt install nvidia-drivers" isn't going to stop anyone who already got that far.

Does the "everything comes with Windows out of the box" still apply for the servers and workstations where I imagine the vast majority of these high-end GPUs are going these days?

Tainted kernel. Having to sort out secure boot problems caused by use of an out of tree module. DKMS. Annoying weird issues with different kernel versions and problems running the bleeding edge.

Most cloud instances come with Linux out of the box.

I mean I've personally given our Nvidia rep some light hearted shit for it. Told him I'd appreciate if he passed the feedback up the chain. Can't hurt to provide feedback!