I disagree with "needed". It's entirely possible to have a modern, "smooth-looking boot" now even with the nVidia drivers as they are.
Wayland support is a valid point though.
Regardless, nVidia remains at the top of the pile in terms of performance and support on Linux. Especially for high-end 3D applications like Maya, CUDA, etc.
nVidia also has fundamental disagreements about the right graphics architecture for the system with many of the Linux folk. I personally think nVidia's concerns about that are valid.
It's unclear whether GEM, etc. are the right long-term approach.
Saying that the nVidia drivers are "at the top of the pile" doesn't say much for the competition.
Just a few of the problems that I have had:
1) In a 2 Monitor setup there is no way to rotate one of the monitors into portrait mode without the other unless you create them as 2 seperate X sessions.
2) Fullscreen almost any OpenGL app/game and it will span across both monitors, which just looks weird.
3) A very odd issue where on my second monitor the fonts will randomly screw up or parts of a window randomly become transparent and I can see the window behind (seems to happen mostly with flash) through it. Only way to fix it is to disable and then re-enable monitor.
Yes, I used to have an ATI card and I can confirm that it had just as many if not more issues.
>> 2) Fullscreen almost any OpenGL app/game and it will span across both monitors, which just looks weird.
This is because the games often use a library like SDL to do the windowing. Their idea of opening a window is called "SetVideoMode", so no wonder it goes wrong.
If a software uses X11 windowing in a way that most apps these days do, using extended window manager hints for fullscreen, etc, this problem would not exist. Btw. I use my window manager's full screen feature to do this. It works a whole lot better for games which allow resizing windows (this often excludes SDL-based games because you explicitly have to tell SDL you want a resizable window) than letting the game set full screen mode (usually via some horrible deprecated X11 legacy api).
The nVidia display driver is not perfect either, it doesn't support Xrandr yet, so expect problems with multiple displays (and rotation) until the situation is corrected.
One of the reasons I always shop for PCs with integrated Intel graphics is because things like multiple-monitors and rotation generally work out of the box, with no configuration needed beyond opening the standard GNOME Monitor Config tool.
Providing documentation sufficient to write an open source driver would not prevent nvidia from also providing a binary driver that does things the "right" way.
Unfortunately I don't think this will ever happen, since from what I know, most of the nvidia binary driver is basically a firmware to run the 'dumb' multi-core gpu hardware. Giving this away would provide valuable knowledge to their competition.
Wayland support is a valid point though.
Regardless, nVidia remains at the top of the pile in terms of performance and support on Linux. Especially for high-end 3D applications like Maya, CUDA, etc.
nVidia also has fundamental disagreements about the right graphics architecture for the system with many of the Linux folk. I personally think nVidia's concerns about that are valid.
It's unclear whether GEM, etc. are the right long-term approach.