That looks promising. I followed step one:

Which gave me a bunch of code names like "Device 139b (rev a2)" that I had never heard of nor found in "nouveau wiki's code names page".

Assuming the sticker under my left wrist is accurate, I have a "NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 960M". If that is correct, Nvidia's website has already proven to be a dead end, as I've tried downloading and installing their binary drivers from their website multiple times over the course of about 8 months on two different ASUS computers.

If you would like me to try again and report exactly what goes wrong (usually "GLX not found" upon starting parole after reboot), I will do so.

Like I said in my first post, I have tried at least a half dozen different strategies posted on various forums around the web, and I am starting to think this is a bug that needs to be reported somewhere. I just do not know where and at what point it is safe to conclude this is impossible.

no clue.
that archwiki article was sufficient for me.

you should post on a hardware forum (e.g. http://tomshardware.co.uk/) and ask them wth you actually have there in your machine (tip: don't mention that you're using linux).

Hi @Feynman, I assume you're struggling with a RoG laptop? Presumably G551? Assuming this, since I'm walking the same painful path, and my laptop looks the same, as the screenshot (the GPU is 960M, confirmed in Windows and Far Cry 4 ). I completely discarded Fedora as an option, since the nouveau drivers it was shipped with caused my system to completely freeze. I had to work entirely in runlevel 3, since the graphic environment was causing complete system freeze.

If you've completely resolved the issue - please share the solution, since I'm still working on it.

Anyway, I see that you've made quite a lot of attempts at installing, deinstalling drivers, etc, seeing the packages you've installed. My hint (since this is the way I'm working atm) is to make a clean new installation with /home on a separate partition so you won't need to migrate your user data each time. and then create a snapshots of "/" and "/boot" partitions (used dd for the purpouse). Yesterday I spent the whole day, digging around this problem, and managed to completely destroy the graphic environment and had to restore the images.

So, today I found out, that one of the reasons for this missbehaviour is the lack of xorg.conf file - usually there is a set of configuration files in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and no xorg.conf file in the distro. In order to resolve it stop the display manager (could be different, ls /etc/init.d/ |grep dm to see which is it)
Then from shell execute:
This will generate xorg.conf.new in the home directory of the user. Copy the file to the /etc/X11/
The existence of xorg.conf is essential, since nvidia-xconfigure attempts to write exactly there. When I created the xorg.conf - I managed to successfully run glxgears, which wasn't possible before. Other thing I found was, that mdm is not compatible with the nVidia drivers, but I'm yet to prove this, since I didn't have enough time to test the solution.

I'll update here if I manage to fix the issue.

Edit: The part with incompatibility was in regard with Nvidia Prime, not with the drivers themselves.

Solution: Switch to Linux Mint

I'm gotta leave a comment (obviouly :P). My system is Gentoo. Ubuntu is more userfriendly, but these days I need to squese my system a bit for performance and space. Anyway back to the question. I had to go with driver 304.* as I seen a lot more performance from the nvidia over the nouveau driver. It is important to note down your card from lspci and note if it is legacy 1 or 2 (not aware of other legacy or still part of releases, but I'm sure nvidia will leave behind new generations :P). VDPAU have bad support for these old cards, so I would ignore instructions for that. I have executeables compiled with VAAPI support. If you use official drivers remember to install nvidia modules each time you compile/install a kernel module set. It was also an advantage to tell kernel not to load nouveau. I would also include VESA in kernel to avoid having problems with missing module until I have a setup.
My system is fast, but the official driver have problems with easy-to-use multiple laptop resolutions (I think card always scales as this seems very fast, but xrandr doesn't show resolutions). Setting up a good xorg.conf is also important. My new laptop also have nvidia and I tried using it, but gave up setting it up as the laptop as it showed desktop in ultra hd on a very small screen. nouveau, intel and amd drivers don't have that problem.

You could do a lot worse

You’ll need Bumblebee or prime-indicator to handle hybrid Nvidia graphics and onboard Intel. See: http://askubuntu.com/questions/45255...lebee-in-14-04

says http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/...omment-2475657

y'all know this thread is 3 years old, right?