> We've used several NVidia cards over the years - mostly in Thinkpad
> laptops.  I wish they the drivers were FLOSS but we've never had a
> problem with them.
I have to second in on this. Over the past fifteen years I've only been using nVidia cards. I 
learned my lesson after I bought an ATI Radeon and ended up selling it soon afterwards because 
the Linux drivers just weren't working (*). Until now I had a total of six different nVidia 
cards: three mobile ones in laptops and three in desktop PCs. With nVidia's proprietary drivers 
these cards Just Work under Linux and deliver high performance comparable with Windows. The 
amount of problems these drivers cause is really minimal compared to other system components like 
sound or WiFi, at least from my experience.

(*) AMD suposedly cares now for Linux more than ATI did back in the days and it releases open 
source drivers. A friend of mine got a Navi 5700 soon after it was released. He spent first weeks 
not being able to use the card at all since there were no drivers. After a while AMD delivered 
kernel and Mesa updates that allowed booting into the desktop but still no way to take advantage 
of card's full performance. In the end my friend ended up selling the card after several months.

Janek