For a month, I've been running an experiment (on a desktop running Sid). I removed the proprietary drivers and just used the nouveau drivers with my 2070S. Everything mostly just … works? Sharing screens on Meet, Slack, and Teams, four monitors with varying DPI, everything just works. I do not play games or do any GPU heavy stuff though, so ymmv. Still planning to replace it with an AMD card though.
Until starting to work with local LLMs, I’d used nouveau / libre drivers for years without major issues. It’s sort of amazing how much troubleshooting and wrestling is involved getting CUDA working with older, newer or middling hardware.
