All drivers have to deal with fbdev and EFI DRM shenanigans and there's no simple solution (if you insist on hiding boot messages behind pretty graphics, or having a graphical console, which most distros do unfortunately, God forbid you should kernel and system messages for 3 seconds).

Until the ancient fbdev stuff will finally be completely obsolete it's all about compromise. Most often the distro will have a working default, in some corner cases it will backfire. Personally I set my console to text only so I don't have to deal with any of this.

TLDR it can happen, and not necessarily on Nvidia.

As mentioned above, this is corporate work and it's not as easy to sell as Microsoft

Because you're a level 1~2 technician hired in to support an enterprise windows environment and you have no choice.

I'm talking about supporting an American enterprise environment that handles medical patient data. No Linux workstations really. Easier to comply with HIPAA that way.

Is it convoluted BS? Sure why not. But Microsoft services are really sticky once you get integrated at a large scale (5k workstations plus over 100 servers).

Ah. I'm working with much older hardware.

PopOS has been running games fine on my 3070 for many years at this point. It might be worth another try.

uhm, me. Or any of the various communities and forums that exist around the internet here are bound to have helpful people. Personally, i bumped to manjaro for a week. And once i was comfortable with it, i learned how to manually install arch linux. From there everything seemed doable, and it pretty much is 4 years later.

I would say it depends on your level of tech savvyness though, if you're highly savvy, and feel like you could manage it, then i'd say you should give it a shot. If not, there are plenty of simpler distros like mint that will keep your experience heavily curated, muta recently did a video about installing mint actually.

Personally i wouldn't recommend manjaro, it's not that it's bad, it's just kind of a mess. Long story. Installing arch linux manually or at least skimming through the guide gives you a great idea of what the general linux system is constructed of. Very useful if you ever run into problems with GRUB or something.

If you've used debian before and managed, you'd probably be fine, debian is a great choice for a workstation if you just don't want to think about it very much. It'll have a lot of old software, but it's incredibly stable. IMO, the best advice i can give is to spin up a vm, fuck around, and see what you like. Linux is about choice, exercising it is part of the process.

Oh uh, just don't dualboot with windows, windows has a nasty propensity for nuking disks randomly sometimes, every so often a windows update will wipeout grub (it's an easy fix but annoying and pretty daunting, if you've never done it before) on installs, it can sometime overwrite drives to place a bootloader there, i have no idea why.

You could check out distros like mint, zorinOS, fedora, popos, and Nobara. I think all of those will come with nvidia drivers so you don't have to set them up manually. Nobara in particular is set up for gaming out of the box, I don't know how well it actually works personally. You could just install Ventoy on a USB stick then load up multiple Linux distros on it, then just select the one you one to try live at boot. Mint and zorin will be the most familiar.