[wavesquid]

I've had precisely the opposite happen: the NVIDIA driver had always been janky, either preventing standby,or not playing nice with my kernel, or some other weird incompatibility, while nouveau has been rock solid. This is across multiple desktops and laptops over multiple generations of card.

Without nouveau id actively refuse a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU in it.

[silon42]

One card, same experience... nouveau was quite reliable... it was a dual graphics laptop, so I later switched to Intel to get more battery life.

On another laptop (with nVidia Optimus, I believe), it was not usable (at least not for external screen).