Binary blobs provided by Nvidia are extremely unreliable. I've had to ssh to a machine because the graphics don't work at all after some kernel upgrades. Linki

Binary blobs provided by Nvidia are extremely unreliable. I've had to ssh to a machine because the graphics don't work at all after some kernel upgrades. Linking to Theano-CUDA is always a nightmare. Forget about optimus. That has never worked correctly on Linux. The only reason I can see someone wanting nvidia on linux is for CUDA. And in that case, you can't just use the ubuntu pre-built version of the drivers. If you are not doing neural nets locally on Linux, you shouldn't get a discrete graphics card. And if you do get a discrete one, make sure it's not Nvidia since their open source drivers are much inferior to AMD's.