About Nouveau, on a 2 years old laptop I have with an Nvidia card, I always had problems with Ubuntu and Nvidia's proprietary drivers, up to the point that I got so sick of it as to buy a new laptop without an Nvidia card on it. But then I tried out the Nouveau drivers and oh my, the problems vanished. The Nouveau drivers are right now better than the official drivers for some Nvidia cards. And they'll never vanish, even if Nvidia decides to drop support for older GeForce cards.