Nouveau on GTX 650 ti causing instability and lockups
 

I put a GTX 650 ti in my privacy PC because the nouveau driver for it doesn't require non-free blobs. A few days later I started having instability issues like session crashes and system lockups. When there's a session crash and I log back in, Problem Reporter notifies me that xorg-x11-server-Xwayland has crashed. So is this probably just a buggy nouveau driver, or is there something I can do about it? Maybe a compatibility issue with another component of the system? Are there any other video cards that don't require non-free blobs? It would kinda suck to have to go back to the old Radeon.

CPU: AMD FX-4300
Motherboard: MSI 760GMA-P34 (FX)
RAM: 8gb+8gb, but I've tried every stick of DDR3 at my disposal
OS: Fedora 32, and I tried Debian on a second drive
PSU: a 500W that I know for a fact can power better cards

Try the newer technology upstream default DDX driver, which isn't reverse engineered, instead of the nouveau DDX. All my NVidias are using it. See driver primer.

Oh wow, I'm gonna have to read up more on that tomorrow when I'm not so tired and can comprehend what tf I'm reading. It looks like a fun rabithole to go down. I see a lot of "X"s, which make me worried since I'm a Wayland guy.

I recognize nothing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waylan..._Wayland_and_X to suggest Wayland depends on different kernel drivers or different DDX drivers than Xorg.

Nouveau is such a bad driver why ppl use it?

nouveau is OSS to support nvidia graphics and is supplied with the distro so most nvidia cards can work with the initial install. As with most open source software it is unable to handle everything on the cards perfectly since nvidia does not release specs for the chips to the public and coders have to reverse engineer the chipset to make it work. Nvidia does, however, release its drivers to the public with some proprietary pre-compiled portions that can be installed and the nvidia cards work extremely well when using it. Because it is proprietary Fedora chooses to not include that in the distro and uses the OSS nouveau drivers instead.

Nvidia drivers directly from the source can be found at nvidia although some, myself included, have had issues with glitches when installing them directly. For fedora at least rpmfuision provides the same drivers specifically for each kernel release that have no glitches for almost 100% of users.

I'm a bit confused on how to switch to using the modesetting driver. Everwhere I look says to remove xf86-video-<your driver> so that xf86-video-modesetting will be used, but there are no such packages in the fedora repo, not even similarly named packages. So I tried blacklisting nouveau; hardware acceleration is just gone and Wayland sessions don't work, and inxi -Gxx still reports that the driver is nouveau. So I'm kinda lost.

I won't be around to work on this PC later today or tomorrow, I'll be back tuesday, just so you know.

Fedora doesn't use the xf86-video-nouveau upstream name. IIRC Fedora renames it xorg-x11-drv-nouveau. I don't know why various distros don't use upstream's DDX driver names. Debian and it's derivatives use yet other DDX driver names.

xf86-video-modesetting has been obsolete since server 1.17.0, over five years ago. The modesetting as default DDX is included in the Xorg server package, which ensures it's always available.

Because they don't know there is an alternative. The default modesetting DDX driver does not support ancient graphics chips, so distros typically include all the optional DDX drivers by default, in order to avoid people with ancient graphics chips having only drivers that lack acceleration and other features most DEs depend on. None of the distro installers I'm familiar with have the sophistication required to determine whether the (default) modesetting DDX is supported with any given graphics chip encountered. Having the full set of optional drivers also covers the automagic switch that may be needed when a graphic device is changed or added on an already installed system.