I never had any problems with the NVidia driver either, and I can't see how it would prevent the system from booting. (I mean, it's not linked with the kernel

I never had any problems with the NVidia driver either, and I can't see how it would prevent the system from booting. (I mean, it's not linked with the kernel and not set to load the module until X starts, so you can get to a single user mode console or SSH in if X breaks. Maybe people think X and booting are the same thing?) The only complaint I had with NVidia was that a long time ago I had one of the first consumer-grade 4k displays, and it exposed itself as 2 1920x2160 displays. That all worked ... "great". X thought the monitor was two displays, and so anything that cares about the calculation of display boundaries (say, full screen video), didn't work correctly; it would just show on half the monitor. One day I found that a config parsing bug could cause the xrandr extension to be disabled while keeping everything else working, and then full screen worked. (The options to just lie to xrandr or disable it were of course broken, which is why bugs interacting with bugs was the fix. They never fixed the bugs or the bugged bugs, so shrug I guess.) It took me months of pulling out my hair to find that workaround, and having used X since before xrandr was invented it drove me crazy. In a past life, I also pulled out all my hair to get xrandr to work. It never fucking worked. And then the one time you don't want it to work, it works and can't be made not to work. Argh!!! Just send me back to 2000 please! (Since then I've switched to Windows, and I still have that monitor. It works perfectly under Windows. You wouldn't even know that it uses the hacky Displayport MST stuff. Probably have a nice hack hard-coded right into the driver, and if it doesn't activate for some reason, you're completely screwed.)