A reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux that is open source. Since it is reverse engineered, it tends to be buggy. Most Linux distributions use t

A reverse-engineered driver for Nvidia GPUs on Linux that is open source. Since it is reverse engineered, it tends to be buggy. Most Linux distributions use this driver by default, since it is open source. There is an arguably superior driver supplied by Nvidia. It is faster, has better hardware support, and is arguably more stable (1). However, it ships as a closed source binary blob with a source-based shim layer to integrate it into the kernel. (1)My wife has 2 Linux desktops with Nvidia GPUS. She ran nouveau by default. However, on both machines, it would cause a kernel oops, and lock the screen up. My wife assumed it was her entire machine locking up, but I realized from the stack traces that were recorded that it was the GPU driver. I then switched the machines to the Nvidia driver, and they have been stable ever since. I personally always buy hardware from Nvidia, because they provide a binary driver for FreeBSD. They are one of the few companies in the non-server space to provide good packaged drivers for FreeBSD.