Oh yeah, there is no way to use Nvidia on Linux these days. It's all a mess.
Discussion
Dunno. I had nightmares with fglrx drivers back in the days, but never with nvidia. Everything worked out of the box. Granted I always used the proprietary ones.
I do it every day, wtf are you talking about. I even switched to the open source one a couple weeks ago (not nouveau, nvidia-open)
You can get it to work as distros like pop or bazite ship with drivers. But getting full performance or having it "just work" has always been a hot topic in community