F17: Gnome3 & nvidia solutions

[REDIGY]

Hi,
lately I am having some bad luck with my desktop. Both my home and office workstations are hitting different bugs in the Nouveau drivers - the NV34 pc is hitting 745202 and the NV96 is hitting 684688.
In short, both these (dual monitor) setups are unusable with the nouveau and I am forced to use proprietary drivers - however these have another issues with the Gnome3 shell, the NV34 freezes it and NV96 randomly crashes it. So I am stuck with the fallback mode.

I do not wish to give up on gnome, as I am with it for many years, however the user experience is worse the on my old F12 laptop.
I want to ask - is there any (simple) way to at least slightly enhance the user experience?
Any tips or guides welcome...

[Gareth Jones]

There's not much that can be done, until the graphics drivers stabilize. There are a couple of things coming together at the moment with respect to Linux desktop graphics (with more to come in the future):
- The new DRI2/Gallium3d-based driver architecture that the FOSS drivers are now using (or in some cases still being migrated to);
- OpenGL-based desktop shells (GNOME 3 Shell, KDE 4 Plasma, Cinnamon, and Unity) using features of drivers that haven't really been thoroughly debugged in the past (even the non-FOSS drivers).
Unfortunately it'll be a while before all this sorts itself out, especially as there are so many different combinations of graphics chip-sets, drivers and shells to support. Then Wayland will replace X, but hopefully that would be such a destabilizing switch-over...

As a short-term solution, you could try using MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2. I can't remember the repository you need to use, but it's been posted to the forum many times. It's probably a better experience than GNOME 3 fall-back or Xfce for now. On the other hand, last time I tried any non-GL shells (Xfce and LXDE on F15), they still managed to crash Nouveau. (I never managed to get the nVidia blob working.)