First thoughts on the Nouveau drivers
| ~2 minute read
A month ago I did a clean re-install of my Arch Linux system and instead of installing the proprietary nVidia drivers I decided to try out the infamous Nouveau driver. Nouveau is the open source driver compatible with nVidia cards. It's a breeze to set up but has significantly reduced performance according to most people.
These days I don't really use the GPU on linux and I just want my HDMI port to work so I can plug in a 2nd monitor. So I thought I should give it a try.
Setting up
With the official drivers you have to do extra setup which is fucking annoying (especially on a laptop) but Nouveau was a breeze.
On Arch Linux you just have to install mesa and xf86-video-nouveau
and without any setup your card will start working like magic. Check
with your distro for the names of these packages.
My experience
I didn't even notice when the setup was complete so after completing my Arch installation I just had to boot up and my monitor started showing video without doing anything extra which was honestly amazing.
The output on the laptop's screen is totally fine but there is a significant amount of screen tearing which you really can't miss (most of it is in one area somehow) on the external monitor. It's good enough for programming but for watching videos, etc it gets pretty annoying. Apart screen tearing though, I think I prefer Nouveau more than the official drivers, at least in my limited use case.
If there even is any difference in power consumption, I'd say Nouveau wins by being the least power hungry (next to only using the integrated graphics, of course)
I like Nouveau because it's very very quick to set up and I'll continue to use it on installations that need to "just work". But right now I think I'll just switch back to the proprietary drivers.
This is post 13 of #100DaysToOffload