Huh, I would have expected the opposite situation to happen...
Generally, the open-source drivers for Nvidia are good for everyday use from what I understand, stuff like just running a desktop environment with special effects and whatever daily work tasks you do, but if you want to do any amount of serious gaming, you go with Nvidia's closed-source drivers. That the closed source ones fail to initialize any backend defies my expectations, so I guess I'm at a loss unfortunately.
If you can play games at reasonable speeds using the open-source drivers, go for it. If that solves your problem, I see no reason to try forcing the closed-source ones to play nice unless you really want to try out Vulkan.
Generally, the open-source drivers for Nvidia are good for everyday use from what I understand, stuff like just running a desktop environment with special effects and whatever daily work tasks you do, but if you want to do any amount of serious gaming, you go with Nvidia's closed-source drivers. That the closed source ones fail to initialize any backend defies my expectations, so I guess I'm at a loss unfortunately.
If you can play games at reasonable speeds using the open-source drivers, go for it. If that solves your problem, I see no reason to try forcing the closed-source ones to play nice unless you really want to try out Vulkan.