I main use Thinkpads myself but once I start getting my computer refurbishing business up and running. Not all laptops are not using the same hardware.

I researched on the web for the open source and retail drivers how to improve on tearing and performance etc but there are to many sites that offer their own options.

I do have one friend that had a HP 23 all in one and its running great with mint 18.3 the open source driver. It did not like closed source driver at all. My thinking is too use fixes for the tearing. If gaming is involved than open source orcretail driver?

There is no "the" open source driver for NVidia GPUs. First, there are drivers in kernel and for X that need to be distinguished between. For kernel there is only the one named nouveau for NVidia GPUs. For X, there are two competent open source drivers for NVidia called DDX. The DDX named nouveau is provided by the upstream package named xf86-video-nouveau. Some distros give this package a different name, such as in Debian it's called xserver-xorg-video-nouveau. The DDX named modesetting is a component of the X server package. The modesetting DDX is a newer technology, so is not supported by the oldest hardware.