The author, Ilia, noticed that this is on HN and responded in the mailing list thread. I don't know if I agree with the take, but I'll repost because I found it interesting.
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I've glanced at the HN discussion about this situation
[...] and it does seem like
people are focusing on the wrong thing... the important bit isn't that
nouveau crashes and burns in some situations—everyone already knew
that, including the users of nouveau who continue to use it
nonetheless. It's that if every piece of software feels free to ignore
a system integrator's or user's wishes, then the user now has to know
how to override that behaviour separately in every application. The
situation is that Distro X has decided that nouveau is the right thing
for its users. A user can disable that by uninstalling or otherwise
disabling nouveau if they wish. But now chrome comes along with its
own set of rules. What if every application starts doing that?
It should also be noted that outside of a few pathological cases, like
creating 2GB+ textures which never happens in practice, nouveau works
just fine for me. For other people, it dies at random intervals,
irrespective of whether they're using chrome or not. While this is a
non-ideal scenario, chrome shouldn't be in the business of worrying
about things like that. It just confuses the situation for everyone.
> every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator
Yes, they do and they have very good reasons for it. Working with distros to ensure they ship the right libraries takes an infinite amount of effort so companies that what to ship a product to their users will work around it.
This also happens in the server space with the massive popularity of containers and language-specific package managers.
The traditional Linux Distro model is extremely flawed.
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I've glanced at the HN discussion about this situation [...] and it does seem like people are focusing on the wrong thing... the important bit isn't that nouveau crashes and burns in some situations—everyone already knew that, including the users of nouveau who continue to use it nonetheless. It's that if every piece of software feels free to ignore a system integrator's or user's wishes, then the user now has to know how to override that behaviour separately in every application. The situation is that Distro X has decided that nouveau is the right thing for its users. A user can disable that by uninstalling or otherwise disabling nouveau if they wish. But now chrome comes along with its own set of rules. What if every application starts doing that?
It should also be noted that outside of a few pathological cases, like creating 2GB+ textures which never happens in practice, nouveau works just fine for me. For other people, it dies at random intervals, irrespective of whether they're using chrome or not. While this is a non-ideal scenario, chrome shouldn't be in the business of worrying about things like that. It just confuses the situation for everyone.