Nouveau will bring up you're Linux desktop just fine and connect all your monitors.
It will run OpenGL apps and light games.
Last time I checked it could not boost the clock and push most chips to high performance mode.
This is mostly 100% Nvidia's fault of not opening up the specs.
Otherwise what nouveau has been able to reverse engineer is just amazing.
The nouveau driver is so much less painful to use, it just works completely seamlessly. If you don't need the extra performance, it is not worth the trouble to install the Nvidia blob.
Unfortunately I had very negative experience with it. I have a laptop with an Nvidia secondary, GPU and had the repeat terrible experience of my computer locking up right on boot due to the broken Nouveau driver that shipped with the kernel. It'd have been fine to not even initialize the GPU, as I wasn't actually using it, which is what I ended up doing, disabling nouveau right from the Grub menu.
