First off, I love Linux (sorry Richard; Gnu/Linux). I particularly love Xubuntu. It's simple, stays out of your way and most importantly to my eye, blue.
I recently purchased a second hand Xeon tower. It came with a bottom of the line Quadro video card. I was fine with it since I had no intention of using the computer to do any heavy 3D applications, just be a workstation and display a desktop. Well, two actually. Because of the limited ram in the card it wasn't able to drive two 1080p monitors and provided me with some incredibly slow reactions as it desperately tried to shuffle memory around.
I upgraded to a slightly more modern 710 card. This provided enough ram and power to run the two monitors without any tearing or hesitation, even with the Nouveau driver. I was happy. I had my favorite desktop with two monitors and set down to get some work done. My computer froze. It locked up completely. I couldn't even ssh in from my laptop. It had completely stopped responding.
Despondent, I powered off the machine and started it back up, watching the startup carefully for issues as it booted. Other than the expected journal recovery nothing seemed amiss. I went through the logs and found no hint of any issues. In desperation I decided that it might be something to do with the way Ubuntu was configuring things and distro hopped to Cent OS, Slackware and even tried Arch and Gentoo. All eventually did the same thing, regardless of desktop environment.
I went back to Xubuntu and everything seemed to work fine for a few days and then it happened again. Then I noticed when it was happening. While the graphics were performing some work intensive action. I swapped out the Nouveau driver for the proprietary Nvidia one. I haven't had a problem since. This leads me to believe there is a serious issue with the open source driver. I'm not sure what it is, or even how to report the bug since I can't reliably replicate it. I am just disappointed.
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