31st January 2017, 10:37
Hi kdemeoz,
Nouveau has gone a loooong way since Mint 17 & KDE4 days. For an old card like you have, I would maybe even go so far and say it's a better solution than the proprietary driver (maybe not for gaming, but for desktop definitely). My friend has an even older Nvidia card (but not so old that it would fall into legacy driver support) and Maui doesn't even come up with proprietary driver - it says that no OpenGL 2.1 support was found. But with Nouveau ALL works correctly. So I have only good experience with Nouveau. Of course, you cannot try it with the newest Nvidia cards, but with Kepler and older ones I would say that the experience is very good (especially if gaming is not required).
Nouveau has gone a loooong way since Mint 17 & KDE4 days. For an old card like you have, I would maybe even go so far and say it's a better solution than the proprietary driver (maybe not for gaming, but for desktop definitely). My friend has an even older Nvidia card (but not so old that it would fall into legacy driver support) and Maui doesn't even come up with proprietary driver - it says that no OpenGL 2.1 support was found. But with Nouveau ALL works correctly. So I have only good experience with Nouveau. Of course, you cannot try it with the newest Nvidia cards, but with Kepler and older ones I would say that the experience is very good (especially if gaming is not required).