On Wednesday 13 November 2019 01:49:55 pm Felix Miata wrote:
> Michael composed on 2019-11-13 08:48 (UTC-0600):
> > From personal experience with MX Linux (non-systemd Debian 9 stretch), I
> > concur with Nik and Nick (and I'll add nvidia is a twitchy little
> > asshat).
> >
> > - Get a working system with nouveau.
>
> Or not. Do not confuse the nouveau kernel driver with the nouveau DDX (X
> and Wayland) driver. The nouveau kernel driver provides the kernel mode
> setting functionality that competent DDXes depend on.
>
> Xserver-xorg-video-nouveau is a reverse-engineered, *optional*, DDX built
> only for NVidia GPUs. The default DDX is newer technology, automatically
> used when: 1-it supports any non-ancient (AMD or Intel or NVidia) GPU;
> 2-KMS is not disabled; and 3-no optional DDX is installed. It can also be
> explicitly configured to be used even though an applicable optional DDX is
> available. It's provided by the xserver-org package itself. When in use,
> modeset(0) will normally be found copiously in Xorg.0.log.
>
> The modesetting DDX is in use here by all the NVidia GPUs I have that are
> new enough for it to support, those newer than approximately 10-12 years of
> age.

Thank you Felix!

Old mainframe guys like myself probably shouldn't be giving GPU advice ;)