I had this problem at $JOB-1 where I had a big fat Dell desktop workstation with an nVidia card in it. I don't remember the model but it was a "pro" grade device: Fire or Quadro or some such BS marketing name.
There were lots of old LCD monitors around the office. As soon as I could, I went dual screen. Then I decided to go triple-head.
Problem.
I found a 2nd card, another nVidia, but it was a different GPU generation. The same Nouveau driver can run it, but not the nVidia driver, and you can't have two nVidia drivers installed side-by-side.
I tried multiple nVidia cards from the office spares pile but I couldn't find two the same generation of GPU for ages. When I finally did, the next kernel upgrade nuked the nVidia legacy driver -- it only supports a certain range of kernel versions.
In the end, a colleague took pity and lent me one of his own cards, an old gamer's card with 4 outputs, 3 usable at once. Perfect.
But when he wanted it back, to sell it, it was back into driver hell.
In the end, I managed to get a huge fat double-slot AMD card from the IT department, with 4 outputs, and it Just Worked™ with a FOSS driver.
NVidia driver versions are a massive cluster-fsck and perfectly good working cards are now e-waste because nVidia doesn't maintain its proprietary drivers, doesn't support more than a handful of GPU families in each release, and won't let you install >1 driver at a time.
I am not a gamer. I don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance or CUDA or any of those toys. I just want a shedload of pixels in front of me, updated quickly, with some screens in portrait and some in landscape. (And a desktop that properly supports vertical panels so I can use those screens in any orientation I want with effective use of space.)
There were lots of old LCD monitors around the office. As soon as I could, I went dual screen. Then I decided to go triple-head.
Problem.
I found a 2nd card, another nVidia, but it was a different GPU generation. The same Nouveau driver can run it, but not the nVidia driver, and you can't have two nVidia drivers installed side-by-side.
I tried multiple nVidia cards from the office spares pile but I couldn't find two the same generation of GPU for ages. When I finally did, the next kernel upgrade nuked the nVidia legacy driver -- it only supports a certain range of kernel versions.
In the end, a colleague took pity and lent me one of his own cards, an old gamer's card with 4 outputs, 3 usable at once. Perfect.
But when he wanted it back, to sell it, it was back into driver hell.
In the end, I managed to get a huge fat double-slot AMD card from the IT department, with 4 outputs, and it Just Worked™ with a FOSS driver.
NVidia driver versions are a massive cluster-fsck and perfectly good working cards are now e-waste because nVidia doesn't maintain its proprietary drivers, doesn't support more than a handful of GPU families in each release, and won't let you install >1 driver at a time.
I am not a gamer. I don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance or CUDA or any of those toys. I just want a shedload of pixels in front of me, updated quickly, with some screens in portrait and some in landscape. (And a desktop that properly supports vertical panels so I can use those screens in any orientation I want with effective use of space.)