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.