I couldn't complain enough about Linux with Nvidia cards... The worst part is, my card is something like 8 years old now (The old Dell is still going strong as ever now) so it's a legacy card they won't even open source, it's not like they are ever going to make money from the drivers for Gforce4 ever again...
I have a 2 year old laptop with Nvidia. The driver installer is surprisingly smart (and not in a bad way). I have working accelerated OpenGL 3.3. It doesn't suck, as far as tained kernel modules go.
I wouldn't expect miracles with an 8 year old card though.
Nvidia does a decent job with new GPU's when it comes to 3d and basic graphics. It did a good job with the old GPU's too, but I guess the old drivers aren't maintained a lot.
However, the Nvidia binary driver still lacks some features when it comes to multiple displays, etc. HDMI connect/disconnect does not work on a laptop. There's no Xrandr support yet, so hotplugging displays and screen rotation, etc is not quite there. X has to be restarted more often than I want.
I've heard they're working on Xrandr and other stuff. I still think that they should be open sourced, though.
