Adam Williamson composed on 2019-03-26 11:38 (UTC-0700):
To be clear, this is about DDX drivers, not kernel drivers, right? Seeing "driver" used willy nilly in discussing video issues and configuration is confusing.
...when a *new* graphics card comes out, one that the nouveau driver doesn't actually work with right away, when you try and boot any Linux on a system with that card, nouveau will still get loaded and *try* to work. This may not end well (though I don't have direct experience with this case, so I don't know whether there are other fallback paths...
Wasn't this part of the instigation for the creation of the /other/ DDX driver, the generic one that works with all the big three/four GPUs, AMD/ATI, Intel and NVidia, and maybe the minor players too, the now upstream default, the one that isn't a separate DDX package, instead included in the Xorg server package (where does it come from when running Wayland?):
modesetting?
Except for brief tests, and for hardware too old for its support, I keep /none/ of the optional DDX packages installed, relying on the modesetting DDX. Except for the bugs in downstream reports eventually leading to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/542 the modesetting DDX has been bulletproof for me.