By Swastika Das Sharma
Publication Date: 2025-12-27 07:47:00
Nvidia may be the largest company today by market value and a favourite among tech giants, but that has not always been the case. The Jensen Huang-led company had once faced the ire of Linux CEO Linus Torvalds.
In 2012, the Linux CEO was addressing a public Q&A session when he called Nvidia the ‘worst’ company he had ever dealt with. An old video of the conversation has resurfaced, where Torvalds explained why he thinks so.
“Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we’ve had with hardware manufacture and that is really sad because Nvidia tries sell chips, a lot of chips into the Android market and Nvidia has been the single worst company we’ve ever dealt with,” Linus Torvalds said when a woman asked him about the popular GPU company’s hardware support.
Torvaldos then moved on to use the ‘F-word’ for Nvidia, while showing the company the middle finger.
Nvidia responds
Later, Nvidia had responded to Linus Torvalds‘ complaint saying that supporting Linus was important to Nvidia.
“Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology. When we launched [Optimus], it was with support for Windows 7 only,” a PR-issued statement read.
“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,…
