Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.
Sure, but nvidia has always been seen as a liability for basic operation of the computer. Their driver quality is notoriously as bad as it gets. Nouveau fixed this.
I keep hearing people assert this but I've been using nvidia drivers on Linux for 25 years and aside from the pain of getting them installed, they have always just worked with no issues at all.
Whereas every time I install Debian fresh and temporarily get the Nouveau drivers temporarily, basic desktop graphics are slow (no hardware acceleration) and crash-prone.
