NVIDIA doesn’t see much use case in ~1% of users occasionally dabbling with games, and their professional customers who do animation/rendering/CAD under Linux couldn’t care less about power consumption. I’m not defending NVIDIA, I’m just explaining their attitude which many Linux users find repulsive. I’m not a huge fan of that either but at least they support Linux which is still better than no support at all.
And when you think other companies treat Linux better, think again. Intel will only add support for Intel Thread Director in Linux 5.18 which will release in approximately 5 months, i.e. almost a full year later after Windows 11 which supported the feature from the get go.
If you deal with hundreds or even thousands of Linux systems with NVIDIA GPUs and threaten the company with the cancellation of the contract, they may as well address the issue swiftly. Other than that, we really stand no chance. Even look at these forums: quite a low activity overall, most people come, create a post never to be seen again. Compare that to their GeForce forums where there are hundreds of posts daily, each regression garners dozens of confirmations.
I told NVIDIA the idle power consumption had increased recently (not by a lot from 8.5W to 11W for my 1660 Ti) - what have they done? Nothing, didn’t even confirm the issue. How many people have replied to my thread? Zero.
If Google Chrome laptops start using NVIDIA GPUs (which sounds extremely unlikely) there’s a chance NVIDIA will treat their Linux drivers better. I see no other outcome. Linux on the desktop is too much a niche OS.
Maybe write to this topic as well though NVIDIA considers it “solved”.