The proprietary drivers got much better, they’re really usable without any noticeable issues. There’s also an effort to get solid open-source drivers, but these don’t work with older cards yet.

I recommend that you boot your distro of choice from USB and see if it works for you.

You might be surprised.

If it doesn’t work with one, try a different distribution.

I’ve used Linux with nvidia cards and didn’t have issues, but I am not very demanding.

Personally I’ve been using a Nvidia card on Linux for 4 ish years now originally on a 970 which had a few problems but really only with Wayland, x was flawless now I have a 3070 which I haven’t had any issues on Wayland with the newer drivers and id say I taxed both fairly hard between gaming and blender

A lot better these days. While I still don’t like nvidia, I think they’re generally moving in the right direction.

Playing CP2077 and BG3 every day no problem, and running AI models like a champ.

Unless you’re living several years in the past, Nvidia drivers aren’t much of an issue anymore.

I’ve got a GTX 1080 Ti and after a couple hours of finagling on initial install of Linux Mint I haven’t had any trouble at all. Nvidia ships some proprietary drivers you can use instead of the unofficial open source ones and nvidia-driver-535 has been getting it done no problem.

Other GPU models I can’t speak for, as I don’t own them, and I see some history of folks having trouble with Nvidia. But I got mine done with barely a hitch.

I run fedora 40 on a desktop and laptop and it’s perfect. Installing the drivers through rpm fusion was dead easy, 3 commands in the terminal and done. Wayland is FINALLY there. Fractional scaling is there. Steam games launch fine. I only miss a handful of programs I can’t live without. Affinity software suite and a few games that use EAC are the only reason I keep a windows partition installed. After windows 11 bloatware and lag and intrusive ads and useless AI crap Linux is now home for me. Install and dual boot, you will find yourself more and more running in linux because it works great and privacy is nice.

pretty great, i would avoid wayland though, there still seems to be nvidia problems there.

Nvidia cards are supported with the proprietary drivers; the game I play (Stepmania, OutFox) historically was without artifacts on nvidia systems. Nowadays, Wayland is moving forward, and nvidia is just behind on supporting it compared to AMD. According to this thread below you should be fine as long as you use nvidia drivers from version 560+.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1d5kwpu/wayland_on_nvidia_do_they_play_well_together/

Works fine.

The irony is, unlike the old days - actually AMD (ATI) is recommend for Linux now because the drivers are better.

This is in stark contrast to the fglrx days where that driver was an absolute abortion and NVIDIA was really the only usable one.

Not sure when you started your Linux journey but I avoided AMD for years based on that.

Now the tables have turned but I didn’t realize until after I purchased my NUC which has NVIDIA RTX graphics. So I guess I’m stuck on NVIDIA for the foreseeable future