Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-l

Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-c... Basically, if you're not a gamer, the open-source Nouveau driver should provide all you need, assuming it works for your card. But parts of your system may stop working, or cause other bugs, from not using the official drivers. edit I might have misinterpreted your question, so here's an alternate answer. If you mean "Why can't we just do 3D rendering with a framebuffer?", a framebuffer is just a copy of the rendered screen in memory. You render it in your local CPU, and then copy it over into video card memory. So it doesn't use hardware rendering, and can work with pretty much any card. If you do want to do hardware rendering (or most any feature of your card at all) you have to write a kernel driver (the DRM) to use the chip, and then some userland software (the DRI) to manipulate that driver, and send data to it somehow from your client app using a standard API for 3d graphics (OpenGL's GLX extension for the X11 protocol). The devil is in the details though, so to work around some limitations, some people wrote new graphics software to allow the client app to render without a "middle man" in the way. That's where you get Wayland.