Just upgraded to 16.04 LTS and that works as well. To be clear, for both 14.04 and 16.04, the proprietary NVIDIA drivers are available via the nvidia-304 package, but I'm not using those. The nouveau driver itself works on 14.04 and 16.04.
FWIW, back when I tried running 18.04/20.04, when programs were hanging I checked dmesg and saw errors of the form "watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#3 stuck for 22s" -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X, which is subscribed to xserver-xorg-video-nouveau in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1860483 Title: [nouveau, GeForce 7300 LE] screen background overlaid with scan type artifact in red To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1860483/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat Post to : ubuntu-x-swat@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
