The CES 2015 conference is in full swing and most of the bigger companies have already made their announcements, including NVIDIA. Some of their presentations have been done using an Ubuntu system, as you can see in the video below.

It's actually quite surprising to see a Linux system used to demo some of the latest NVIDIA technologies, but we should get used to this kind of appearances. Just like any other company out there, it needs to keep its cost down, so if there is a free operating system available that can do the same things or even better than a non-free one, why spend the money?

In this case, NVIDIA is using Ubuntu for its presentation and it's not just for a slide or two. The guy who is showing the advances made by the NVIDIA DRIVE PX auto-pilot computer is none other than Jen-Hsun Huang, the NVIDIA CEO. It's hard to get better endorsement for an operating system when the CEO of one of the biggest hardware companies on this planet is using your system in the most important expo of the year.

NVIDIA on Linux was not a happy story

People wouldn't have dreamed of using a Linux system for a presentation five years ago. It would be very hard to set up a system with two monitors or to have the image split between a laptop and a projector. It wasn't hard, but there was no intuitive and simple way to do it.

The advances made by the hardware companies like NVIDIA, AMD or Intel have been significant, and it's much easier right now to set it all up. Everything is much friendlier and the technology is reliable. Sure enough, there is still a lot of work to be done, but Linux is getting there and it's getting better with each year.