nvidia + linux

[Michael Butash]

So far I am NOT impressed with my choice to go with nvidia, as the 
graphics change from amd has caused everything to become entirely 
unstable again.

KDE neon is a basketcase, again with these nvidia binary drivers.  
Installing what I thought would have been generally resolved from 5.7.4 
on my amd build, with nvidia it's doing all the weird "unable to keep 
displays straight in the wm" problem, and causes me to reboot daily when 
plasma components finally just crash.  This seems partially due to 
nvidia drivers not playing well, as amd oss drivers were perfect when 
last I'd used 5.7.4.

Eventually since it *was* working with my old intel mobo (z97+intel i7 
haswell cpu), I literally just popped in my old ssd and install I was 
using for a year, installed nvidia drivers, and went to work with the 
new system, a dual cpu xeon e5 v4 mobo. Yep, same buggy as hell with a 
clean neon install as with my old ubuntu 16.04 with neon ppa overlays.  
Totally different beast, bugs, instability, I couldn't even get luks to 
unlock my disk at splash properly with this system.  I got it working 
booting single-user and disabling grub splash, but every time I power 
off displays, kde entirely poops the bed and crashes.  Wonderful, thanks 
guys.

Game-wise, once I got to a workable os with my old ubuntu, The Witcher 2 
ran great with nvidia, much prettier than my amd with all the effects 
cranked even at 3840x2160.  Then I play Portal 2 and it crashes as soon 
as I begin actually moving around past the intro.  Shadow of Mordor was 
as broken with nvidia binaries as it was with amd oss drivers, not 
rendering half the main mesh object constructs in the game, including 
most of my armor and the ground map.  Not seeing most of the ground did 
give me a slight tactical advantage in playing it, but not exactly the 
way I wished to do so.

All in all, my new system is proving most challenging to get anything to 
behave on, and I'm thinking this 1070gtx card is just another whole new 
devil I don't know, and debating if I even want to.

Is this a consistent experience using nvidia and kde for others? Or 
nvidia + other wm...?  Curious what people are using, and not being 
driven insane with catastrophic bugs, if folks *do * use multiple displays.

I'm thinking I need to re-explore wm's as kde figures out their 
multi-monitor brokenness.  As broken as it is, everything else only 
seems more so, hopefully others are winning where kde is not.

-mb