Comment 77 for bug 948053

Since upgrading to 12.04 (from 10.04), my system is unstable. Graphics drivers seems to be the problem, as it's stable without nvidia drivers loaded.
Drivers version 173 worked fine for my GeForce 9800 GT during the last years (with the exception of not letting me test WebGL on Firefox).

I'm a developer, so i needed to check WebGL. For that reason i installed some new drivers version directly from nvidia a few months ago on my 10.04 installation (can't remember the version number). Eventually had to go back to 173 (from repos).
That's the reason i don't want to download drivers from nvidia site again.

So, today i tried to install the debian's version of 173.14.35: http://packages.debian.org/sid/xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-legacy-173xx

Had to add "http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main non-free" and "http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main contrib" to "/etc/apt/sources.list".
This gave me some trouble with packages and versions: even had to uninstall "nvidia-current", and therefore "ubuntu-desktop". I did all this on root's recovery console.
By some magic, after restarting everything was working; even unity 3d and compiz. So i commented those repos in "sources.list", and reinstalled everything removed in the process (aptitude removed a lot of packages linked to wine, so i did "apt-get install wine" and the came back).
However, things eventually became very unstable: on some restarts there was no 3d subsystem (no unity, no d3d on wine), some other tries the compiz unity plugin reported crashes, and so on.

Right now i'm removing everything regarding that 173.14.35-1 version, and sticking to nvidia-current from x-swat ppa. I'll wait until we have an ubuntu package for ".35".
But if everything keeps this unstable, i'll have no other choice but to go away from ubuntu and try other distros. (I'd hate to, but unfortunatelly it's giving me an unacceptable instability for a workstation).