For years, Nvidia has produced second-rate Linux drivers. They cause problems with SecureBoot, they don't work with multiple monitors, they flicker, they don't manage framebuffers properly, they hang for no reason... The list of problems people have had are endless. Search any Linux forum and more than half of the graphical problems people have are about Nvidia. How this company can earn $4tn and they can't even make decent drivers for their ONE consumer product is, frankly, beyond me.

For years it was ATI (now AMD) that were the butt of the driver jokes. All through the 90s it was well known that ATI cards were absolutely rock solid and could give other cards a run for their money..... about a year after launch when the drivers were debugged... As an owner of an ATI Rage Pro I was pleasantly surprised to see my FPS higher than 3dfx and Riva TNT owners... I just had to wait about 8 months for the drivers to stop being pish.

Nowadays, it's Nvidia's drivers. The latest 580 drivers (at time of writing) have been almost universally panned as being an unstable mess. IT's true, that if you have a very simple PC with standard components and only do standard tasks, the driver works okay. But the moment you have something less than 90% standard, the drivers go bananas.

Optimus laptops? Framebuffer problems. Dual Monitors? Stuttering and freezing Play games? Random freezes DirectX12? Slowdowns and stuttering Wayland? Don't get me started X11? Black screens on boot.

And, the thing is, none of these things are new. People have been fighting with the majority of these problems for a decade. It's almost like Nvidia don't care about Linux (did you hear the slight sarcasm there).

Luckily, they changed their mind about sharing details about their drivers, and a few teams have been looking to make something better. We now have "Open" drivers, which are now recommended on Ubuntu-based systems, and do seem to be a lot less janky... But "a lot less" still means "very" janky.

But, the standout star of the show is Nouveau. Originally, we only used Nouveau as a bootstrap... You use it to get X running, and then you shifted to the NVidia drivers as soon as the system was all up to date and stable. But recently I've been trying to stay on Nouveau.. and the results were surprising.

It was actually accidental... I reinstalled my system to deal with the Nvidia driver issues, but at the final boot I had to run out of the door to collect the kids from school.. When I came home, I completely forgot that I hadn't installed the Nvidia drivers, so I loaded up Steam, got into a game (Darkenstein 3D, it's really good, try it! You get to kick Nazis in the nuts, which is always a laudable activity).... And a few hours later, I finished playing, and then loaded up Snowrunner... I was getting about 80fps, higher than before the reboot, the fog was working nicely, and I was very pleased.

Then I tried Atomic Heart, and the FPS dropped precipitously.. Everything was janky... So I checked my drivers and realised that I'd never moved on from Nouveau! So, surprised, I updated to the NV580 drivers, and Atomic Heart was STILL janky... only now, it refused to start unless I chose a specific Proton, it crashed if I alt-tabbed during a loading screen, and randomly hung..... So, I did some research, found that DirectX12 wasn't working very well under Proton, added "-dx11" as a command line prompt, and the game started working perfectly again... until it crashed...

So I switched back to Nouveau... Hey presto! the game works in any version of Proton, doesn't stutter and hasn't crashed (yet). The FPS is about 5-8fps lower (at about 65fps), but seriously, the game looks and plays just as well as the NV drivers.

So... has it happened? Have the Nouveau drivers finally got better than the Nvidia default drivers? In my opinion, it's a hard sell to move to the proprietary drivers now. Unless you need DLSS4 or some of the AI/CUDA stuff, which Nvidia (unsurprisingly) have been more focussed on than their graphics drivers, I say stick with Nouveau now!

An amazing result for the Nouveau team! Congratulations to them all on their many years of hard work!