While I admire the work developers are doing to create open source driver solutions, no gamer in their right mind would want to use Nouveau instead of Nvidia's proprietary driver. And Nouveau doesn't have Vulkan support, which rules out a considerable number of games with Steam Proton and Lutris.

This means Nvidia gamers need to install the proprietary driver. Fortunately, Linux distributions like Pop!_OS, Ubuntu and Mint made this a straightforward process. But is it?

Using Ubuntu 18.10 as an example, users just need to go "Software & Updates" and click on "Additional Drivers." There you'll see an option to install the Nvidia Driver metapackage, labeled as nvidia-driver-390. Select it, click apply, and you're no longer using that subpar open source driver.

But here's the first problem: is this all common knowledge for new users? I'm willing to bet it is not. Even if they've been told the differences between open source and proprietary drivers, what happens when they do navigate to this area of Ubuntu and update? Maybe they'll be eager to check out what all this fuss is about Steam Proton and playing their favorite Windows games on Linux.