Nouveau driver
Ranked 7 of 8 graphics drivers by recommenders
Free open-source Nvidia driver that has become stable in recent kernels, but people say it lags the proprietary driver for 3D rendering and gaming.
Free open-source Nvidia driver that has become stable in recent kernels, but people say it lags the proprietary driver for 3D rendering and gaming.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 42%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Much better in recent releases
“Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly.”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release” “Nouveau seems pretty damn good these days.”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Native Instant Space Switching on macOS”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weak 3D, gaming and desktop performance
“Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything)”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it” “the proprietary driver has always blown away nouveau at 3D rendering performance and featureset”
Comment from 24 Feb 2026 in “FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook. AI build one for me” “basic desktop graphics are slow (no hardware acceleration) and crash-prone”
Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it” - Comment from 23 Feb 2026 in “FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook. AI build one for me”
Limited clock control and crippled firmware
“there is no way (on my card at least) for the open source drivers to control the GPU clock speed”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User” “Nouveau drivers are intentionally crippled with a special firmware”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User” Incomplete support for some GPUs
“Noveau can't talk properly with the backlight control of my card”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop” “sometimes only has very basic support for some GPUs”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features”
Other graphics drivers people recommend
The four most recommended other graphics drivers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA proprietary Linux drivers | 40 | 49 | 45% | 10 | 20 yrs9 owners | — |
| Mesa | 30 | 9 | 77% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Nvidia drivers | 25 | 53 | 32% | 9 | 14 yrs4 owners | — |
| amdgpu driver | 15 | 11 | 58% | 6 | — | — |
| Nouveau driverThis page | 8 | 11 | 42% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
18 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“The exception is the Nouveau driver, but without it X was also perfectly stable for me”
“Nouveau doesn't care: if it's nVidia, it'll drive it.”
“Nouveau got a bunch of stability improvments in Linux 6.19, without which Wayland crashes roughly weekly.”
“sometimes only has very basic support for some GPUs”
“Nouveau is close to useless for GPGPU compute”
“NVIDIA GPUs were infamous for doing this with nouveau on less ideally supported cards”
“You can run no-mode-set to get video output at boot/installation phase but then you're stuck with 800x600.”
“Nouveau seems pretty damn good these days.”
“Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.”
“the proprietary driver has always blown away nouveau at 3D rendering performance and featureset”
“the second you need to do any 3d rendering or decoding it’s atrocious”
“my subjective experience is that Nouveau might be faster”
“there is no way (on my card at least) for the open source drivers to control the GPU clock speed”
“Nouveau drivers are intentionally crippled with a special firmware”
“basic desktop graphics are slow (no hardware acceleration) and crash-prone”
“most people are just looking to blacklist the mod given the collateral problems”
“Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything)”
“Noveau can't talk properly with the backlight control of my card”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.