Proprietary or open source NVidia drivers?

[Guillaume]

Hi,

> I would like to ask any NVidia Fedora users do you use open source or
> proprietary NVidia drivers?
> 

I personally use the open source "nouveau" driver on my computers
running Nvidia cards.

> Why do you use driver that you use? Have you tried the other one? What
> are the benefits and disadvantages to both of them?
> 

I have used both over time. Main differences will probably depend on
your hardware and the usage you want to do of your computer.

There are two caes : if nouveau won't work on your system at all,
you're stuck with vesa or the proprietary driver. If it works with your
card, you can use it knowing that : 

* you can't do any serious 3D (yet). The experimental dri libs *could*
make you use compositing with nouveau, although it's potentially highly
unstable and not recommended at the time.

* so far video acceleration works on all my nvidia cards on files I
tried. I don't know if everything is fully supported but I've got a low
cpu system that can play h264 videos just fine with nouveau.

* 2D rendering is fine. I never had any trouble on this matter, on old
and new nvidia cards.


Only trouble I had with nouveau so far is that the "Ion" chipsets
previously were not supported. I had to fall back to the proprietary
driver instead for some time.


On the other hand, there are a few drawbacks in having the nvidia
proprietary driver :

* first of all, this might or might not be a problem for you, but this
is a binary blob. It will sometimes be out of sync with either X or the
kernel, although I've not seen that often (as opposed to other binary
drivers such as poulsbo)

* the nvidia-config scripts will modify your xorg.conf file. You could
be fine with this or not ; I personally like having no xorg.conf at all
anymore and having some subsections in xorg.conf.d/ 

> If you use proprietary drivers how do you install them? Which package
> or packages need to be installed? Which repository has best
> proprietary NVidia drivers?

I used RPMfusion and nvidia-akmod. I think there were some kmod-nvidia
packages for precompiled binaries (which I don't use since I tend to
recompile my kernel)
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