NVIDIA Confirms Linux Driver Problems

I'm glad NVIDIA is one of those companies that actually admit their mistakes. I do have one of the affected chipsets in my desktop. Fortunately my chipset works well enough with Nouveau (after fixing the botched autoconfiguration) that I haven't installed a recent proprietary driver. I'm not a gamer and the FOSS driver has been good enough. Hopefully a fixed driver will be forthcoming shortly.

About the only headache I have with my various Linux desktops (all running Debian Squeeze+KDE) is NVidia-driver-related. Some of my machines have the older 195.x driver, some the more recent 280.x driver from backports. Every once in a while, maybe every two or three weeks, I'll experience a total desktop freeze forcing me to hard-reboot the machine and lose all my unsaved work. This only happens on machines with NVidia cards.

I guess I should feel lucky. I only have the one system with an NVIDIA chipset and it works perfectly running the nouveau driver.

Yeah, I'm running the nouveau driver on my system with KDE4, it's working well.

Unfortunately kwin's advanced effects won't work with the nouveau drivers (correct me if I'm wrong). Since I have lots of apps and Virtualbox windows open, I use things like the exposé function all the time. I'm also running TwinView on two monitors. Hency my need for the closed source drivers.

Dunno, all the affects I had with the nVidia driver are still working just fine. I've noticed no difference. Dual Monitors work the same as before too.

Which afffects do you refer to.

I find that nouveau works better the more recent it is. What I mean is that it works (for me) with no issues on more "up-to-date" distros, not so much with something like Debian stable or CentOS. Even the 'buntus still seem a bit behind on this front, but Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, etc are good with nouveau. YMMV.