For what it's worth, my experience with Nouveau has been dismal.

I use KDE plasma, which runs everything via accelerated graphics and I would encounter system-wide lockups within 2 hours, often much closer to within 10 minutes. Nouveau has better terminal support though, supporting the higher resolutions that the proprietary driver can't be bothered to support. So if you have a vt-only use-case, it's a win. But otherwise, I'm very wary. Granted, the last time I tried was about a year ago, but the troubles I had been experiencing were common with other users for long before that.

You could give it a try and see.

As for usage, iirc, if it's enabled in your kernel config, it's loaded by default, even if the proprietary drivers are installed. I blacklisted the Nouveau module to get the proprietary one loaded (so that I could switch back after a kernel update to see if it worked properly then). Again, things may have changed from when I last tried, but I think you should be able to enable, build and reboot to have it loaded already (obviously, you could rmmod and modprobe if the idea of a reboot doesn't sit well)

-d


On July 23, 2018 12:17:53 Philip Webb <purs...@ca.inter.net> wrote:

Among my efforts to get scanning working again with Gentoo,
I've encountered another problem in a different area.
Recently, I sent a message to this list re Nvidia-drivers
-- that 396.24-r1 wouldn't start with my 4.14.52 kernel,
so I started using 390.67 -- & I've now discovered that there's a problem
with any version of Nvidia & my previous 4.9.16 & 4.2.0-r1 kernels.

Might I be better off, if I used Nouveau instead ?
It is what Mint 17 & 19 seem to use, so must be fairly stable.
So a few questions :

(1) What are people's experiences with Nouveau ?
    -- does it work easily with various kernels ?
    -- does it manage graphics stably & reliably ?
    -- I don't do much with video (a few newsreels) & don't use sound.

(2) If I install it, how do I switch between Nouveau & Nvidia ?

(3) Sadly, I didn't make a Quickpkg of the Nvidia version I was using
when my scanner was working with Gentoo (last time 180626).
I have the distfiles, but not the ebuilds :
is there anywhere I can find ebuilds for Nvidia-Drivers 390.42 390.48 ?

--
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca





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