how well does Nouveau driver work?
 

I've started playing around with debian 6 stable, and was just wondering if its worth it to go to the trouble of removing nouveau, or if it will handle everything well enough. I use my laptop for a little bit of gaming (older games) under wine, all the basic email/web browsing/writing stuff, some photo editing under gimp, movies/music, and a very little bit of Blender work.

Will Nouveau handle all this well enough, or should I use the proprietary nvidia driver?

I have a GTX 260M graphics card

I normally go for proprietary drivers whenever I can. That decision is really up to you man...

As far as being able to handle it, I would recommend installing the proprietary drivers if you want better performance.

I always use the proprietary driver too, so I can't speak about the performance of the nouveau driver, but, according to the nouveau website, the 3D functionality is very limited, so, if you plan to play games on wine, you might have issues (although they mention something named Gallium, that seems to be an experimental driver with 3D functionality). Also, AFAIK, only the proprietary drivers can use the full capabilities of nvidia cards, at the moment (sadly). You can see the functionalities implemented by the nouveau driver, here.

If you need serious 3d, not as in compiz/kwin effects "3d", then nvidia is the only way.
Plus it can do powersaving and vdpau acceleration that nouveau can't.

Does any one know how Nouveau on Squeeze compares to Nouveau on Ubuntu 10.04?

I have a system that needs to be changed from Ubuntu to Debian. I have been really pleased with Nouveau on Ubuntu but do not know what to expect on Squeeze?

Both use version 1:0.0.15. I haven't tried nouveau in squeeze yet, but in my experience, things generally work better in Debian as compared to Ubuntu.

For NV50 based Nvidia cards Nouveau is still lacking: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix

You will probably want to go with the proprietary driver.