Update from my situation …
I think I’ve found a fix for the nouveau kernel fault at boot problem. See the ongoing discussion at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/nouveau/-/issues/213
In addition to this, the wizard responsible for https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/wkazubski:/G03/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/x86_64/ has updated the now abandoned-by-Nvidia “G03” official driver packages there. (I am majorly impressed – I tried to compile the Nvidia sources and found them to be totally broken against current GCC and/or kernels.)
There’s also a matching Leap 15.5 repo. I haven’t had time to try either, but if they work the general opinion has always been that the closed-source Nvidia drivers are superior to their open-source nouveau, etc. counterparts. (I’ve used them for years on earlier openSUSE releases but they were removed from the official repos at or before 15.5, I suppose because Nvidia stopped updating them and the “unbuildable” problems started.)
On that subject, I’d also always read that the “nv” driver (xf86-video-nv??) was old, deprecated, unmaintained, poor-performing, etc. But you, @STurtle , are getting good results with it? Maybe my information was incorrect, and if so it’s nice to know there’s another alternative for this hardware.
Finally, I just yesterday came across @mrmazda’s excellent https://forums.opensuse.org/t/amd-intel-nvidia-x-graphics-driver-primer-third-edition/148576 post but am even more confused after reading it (my fault, not the document’s or its author’s). I had thought that including “nomodeset” on the kernel commandline to disable the nouveau (or whatever) driver resulted in having no GPU acceleration at all, falling back to the framebuffer (FBDEV??) or “vesa” CPU-only code, as indicated by seeing no driver listed in:
$ inxi -Ga
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA G92GLM [Quadro FX 3800M] vendor: Dell driver: N/A
...
and xrandr having only one resolution and no named screens, etc. as I’ve posted before.
But now I’m understanding(??) that instead I’m getting an implicit, unnamed “modesetting” driver that’s built into the X server? That’s believable because the graphics performance I’ve been seeing all this time with “nomodeset” to prevent the nouveau crash hasn’t been terrible. But I don’t do any heavy GPU tasks on this machine (moving windows around, etc. has been fine) so I have nothing to compare it to. I just assumed that the CPU was so fast that pure, un-accelerated, software-only rendering was keeping pace.
So all this has been (for me) for nothing? I don’t need nouveau, nvidia, nv, etc? Not really, because I see no reason to bog down the CPU when the system has a perfectly capable GPU sitting idle. Again, I’d like to understand what’s going on if anyone knowledgeable can explain it.
Thanks for all the continuing interest in the subject, and I still think it’s important because the current Tumbleweed and Leap 15.5 install media doesn’t boot on systems with these GPUs. There’s information on how to handle that in https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_graphics_cards and other documentation, but I claim that most users hitting it will just give up, go to another distro, or back to Windows. (And the other distros will have the same problem once the go to 6.3 and beyond if their install media boots to nouveau on Nvidia systems, at least on the older GPUs.)