Not necessarily a pain to install, however I've had a lot of stupid issues - like not being able to open a TTY session., I can't run Sway, and Hyprland absolutely refuses to work with my 3 monitor setup.

its not terrible, it just sucks that its not automatic. i am not on windows and dont want to be treated like i am.

I mean I use zorin which is an ubuntu spin just made to be as usable as possible out of the box so its super easy. Barely an inconvenience. I see someone mentions bricking but I have not encountered it but I tend to use old hardware soooooo.... oh and i should say old nough that a 4060ti would seem pretty new.

Barring any quirks; for Arch, RHEL, Rocky, Alma, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandrivia, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Void it's as simple as installing nvidia-open. Most other distros its the same, but the package name varies from repository to repository.

In my experience, dealing with repeated nvidia problems is not worth the hassle. Just replace it with a good AMD graphics card and sell that nvidia thing.

It ranges from "automatic" to "infuriating".

If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.

Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.

If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).