Exactly. Nouveau’s performance is enough to run modern Linux desktop. It isn’t good for gaming, that’s a given.
You’re right here. Many Linux developers and so to say more hardcore users buy laptops / computers with integrated Intel graphics as it’s open-source support is second to none.
Also they say that AMD GPUs in the last several years have made huge progress with their open-source drivers.
All the troubles/questions with NVidia are mainly from the people who already has/had hardware with NVidia GPUs, mainly migrating from Windows. Or it’s work-provided and user don’t have the choice ) Seasoned Linux users usually are usually aware about these problems and if they use NVidia GPUs they do it by choice with understanding all the concerns. I think 
This is what I mean, essentially this is my case too ))
To summarize the topic a bit
my humble opinion is this:
If you already have NVidia hardware and need one or more of the following:
- 3D performance for gaming or rendering
- accelerated video encoding/decoding
- CUDA for hardcore scientific computations
- this list can be expanded but nothing concrete comes to mind right now
– then you have no option but to use proprietary NVidia drivers. In most cases you’re better off using packaged version from RPMFusion (though you have some other options available as we’ve discussed).
If you don’t need anything from that list, you need just stable desktop workloads, and if nouveau works well on your GPU (it works better on some GPUs than on others) – then you’re better off using nouveau.
Nouveau’s performance is absolutely totally not comparable to proprietary driver, there’s no question about this. Keep in mind that it’s totally open source and developed by community without much support from (evil!) NVidia. This is also why it can’t support all the numerous NVidia’s GPUs equally well.
On the other hand proprietary driver is widely known to cause wide variety of issues, NVidia’s developers don’t want to include support for many new features required by modern Linux system/desktop. At least with some of these issues nouveau’s support is better – resulting in more smooth and stable Linux desktop experience. Again, at least on the GPUs that work well with nouveau.