Now this is an odd (to me) discovery: This wicked-fast Crux system that I am growing to love more and more all the time actually boots a full second faster without the proprietary Nvidia driver.

xorg-xf86-video-nv has a one-second edge on the 96.43 version, which may or may not have to do with some sort of snap-to for the video output. (I have to manually divert the Nvidia driver to the flat panel; it always wants to connect to a CRT, which is an issue I’ve had for almost a year now.) It’s startup behavior looks identical to what happens in the Arch and Ubuntu versions, so it’s possible that, for quite some time, I’ve been slowing myself down by relying on the 96xx packages.

But I don’t plan on playing many games on this system (I don’t want to compile them! 😆 ), and I don’t use a screensaver or work with Blender et al., so I might just run without the proprietary driver.

I’ll have to see if recompiling the nv driver and the xorg-server packages improves redraw rates or anything; that’s really the only downside of using the Nvidia driver that I can see. But honestly, this thing is moving so fast now I can suffer slightly slower redraws.

P.S.: Don’t bother suggesting the 100+ drivers; Nvidia dropped anything pre-FX when it made the jump to 100+. The lesson learned in that, for me anyway, is not to buy Nvidia again.

P.P.S: The Crux port for the proprietary driver didn’t work; I had to use the Nvidia script to install it. Which is neither here nor there for the purposes of this post, but I felt I should remind myself for the future. 🙂