Nice. Flagship features like these so often feel overlooked in the Linux GPU discussion. I like to think that’s because we’re all very serious pragmatists who don’t care for such frivolous addons, even if the simple truth is that vendors are indifferent towards Linux as an end-user platform.

In light of that, features like these coming in with 1st-party support is a welcome sign that things are (slowly) changing. Emphasis on “slow”; I don’t find it terribly impressive that Nvidia’s partially reversed the proprietary own-goal which they call NVAPI, especially considering the still ongoing parade of new (also proprietary!) standards which they insist on shoehorning into it… but I’ll acknowledge that they’re making progress nevertheless 😤

What an incredible postdiction

To be clear, by using the term “flat-hierarchy” I was indeed suggesting a situation that’s exactly as you say: a company ruled under an iron first used sparingly – ergo “the truly defining characteristic of his leadership is his willingness to be as hands-off as possible.”

We can of course only speculate as to the soft power dynamics at play, although we can be certain that a soft-power dynamic does exist. I even agree with you when you state that this dynamic is unique to Gabe’s specific personality and individual mannerisms and not something which can exist without him. Where we seem to differ, however, is in our opinion of how important Gabe’s special flavor of soft power really is – is it the secret sauce or nothing special?

I argue that it’s nothing special. Given the right hand-picked successor, I foresee an uneventful transition and not a catastrophy. Some things will get easier and some things will get harder, but I think the overall structure and mission of the company will ensure a certain measure of continuity. If anything, I’m actually optimistic; the mere presence of a new leader will help change internal perceptions of what’s possible and help bring about some exciting new ideas.

Is Gabe really that irreplaceable? The way he runs the company (flat-hierarchy), it’s mostly self-governing – the truly defining characteristic of his leadership is his willingness to be as hands-off as possible. A like-minded successor or even governing council could probably quite effectively handle things in Gabe’s absence.

Well… regardless of that: nothing lasts forever, but that’s no reason to assume that things will change for the worse. Gabe seems to put a lot of deliberate thought into his actions, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he has already taken care of preparing for a smooth and faithful transition away from his leadership when the time comes. Who knows, maybe they’ll even do a better job than Gabe could?

As an AMD user on Wayland who primarily uses Steam/Proton, I haven’t had any Wayland-related issues with gaming at all. This isn’t surprising, since the compositor used by Steam Deck (Gamescope) is also Wayland-based.

FYI: If you ever do have compositor-related issues (X11 OR Wayland), you can almost always fix the issue by running the game in a nested Gamescope instance by editing the game’s launch command.