Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.
I still ran in a few snags:
- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.
- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.
Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.
Agree on both counts. I use debian unstable and is usually 50/50 on whether the machine will reboot on a working display after a kernel upgrade. Very easy to fix if you have a bit of knowledge, but certainly not ready for the general public.
I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.