

While I was able to complete the CentOS 7 reinstallation, I never saw the login screen again. I wasn’t worried: I hadn’t put a ton of time into configuring the software on the machine, and planned to just reinstall based on my guide. After multiple restarts, and doing everything I could to edit the nouveau settings from the GRUB, I was still unable to login. This worked great for awhile, until one day I rebooted the machine and the console was threw some errors related to the nouveau drivers. Last year I wrote about my long march toward finally getting a home deep learning station with a CUDA-integrated NVIDIA 1080 GPU up and running on CentOS 7. Script to install NVIDIA docker, followed by a GPU-integrated pytorch container here.Script to configure NVIDIA drivers on Fedora here.Use Docker (strong recommendation - this is the way to go).Use Fedora 29 (soft recommendation - worked for me when CentOS 7 broke).

You will need to reboot afterward, but do the install first since you won't have a working GUI otherwise (before rebooting, the driver will still be in memory even though it is no longer on disk). yum remove all of those then try installing. This will give you a pretty straightforward list. So, I know you are frustrated BUT you would be better off putting more effort into the question - saying, "I have spend hours trying just about everything I could find" without saying what you've tried will put people off, because they won't bother to suggest something that you've probably already tried.

A recent nouveau benchmark using ubuntu 12.10 seems to indicate nouveau still lags considerably behind the prop driver. I did have access to an NVIDIA card at the time and the issue was much the same for that. My ati card is currently sitting in a box because I don't need it (or to waste wattage) but the last time I used it with linux ~4 years ago to do some openGL work, there was a very very substantial difference between the prop driver and the open source one, so you are probably not unjustified here.
