I’ve been gaming on Nvidia cards since I switched over 3 years ago and only had a few issues.

On initial install, the opensource nvidia drivers wouldn’t work - I had to go into the terminal and select the proprietary ones. That’s pretty much it, really. Other than that, I’ve had about the same amount of issues with AMD(integrated graphics) and Nvidia.

On the plus side, Nvidia has a nice little control panel. It’s basic, doesn’t have all that GeForce Experience stuff, plus there are command line utilities like nvidia-smi(basic info) and nvtop(temp, clock, usage, memory stats). AMD doesn’t have a control panel, that I’m aware of.

As far as distro, I’d say just chose the one you’re most comfortable with. I don’t think there are any huge differences between them concerning gaming performance.

if you use the proprietary drivers you’ll be fine, probably not even noticable

if you go with a Radeon card or try using open source drivers then go with god

As long as you can get the driver installed, you’re fine. The only time that might be a problem is if your distro updates something that breaks compatibility with the existing driver, and X refuses to start. You’ll need to know how to install the latest driver from the command line, but then you should be good.

I’ve been running a 3080 with proprietary drivers on manjaro for a couple of years (I would not recommend manjaro, I now recommend endeavorOS if you want something Arch based) and it’s fine. I don’t think I’ve ever hit an nvidia specific bug.

I have 3060 Ti and have had no trouble. I even used it with Arch and Gentoo, and all I needed was installing the drivers (the package manager did it) and it worked out of the box.

@pleasemakesense > Are my fears unfounded/outdated?

They are mostly outdated. Nvidia works just as fine as amd does

To my understanding, nvidia gpus mainly have issues with specific things like wayland, it otherwise works fine for the most part.

I still plan to switch to amd eventually, but its working fine. Linux mint has been a plug and play experience for me and is what I and many others would recommend if you are looking for the easiest transition from Windows.

I wouldnt think about it too hard tho cuz you can just install another distro relatively quickly if you dont like it.

It’s been about a year for me, but I did not have issues using the nvidia version of PopOS.

That said, I still ended up switching to AMD, because the driver is just in the kernel.

Running KDE Neon here, my Nvidia experience has been faultless, adding the PPA and installing the drivers is reliable and straightforward. Wayland works acceptably, but running a single 4k 27" monitor X11 works perfectly, so at this point in time I see no reason to swap to Wayland - I’m sure in time I’ll adopt Wayland, I’m simply not quite ready to drop my ability to create custom fan profiles using GWE just yet.

Nvidia X Server settings are nice, as is nvidia-smi.

I use Fedora 37 workstation with the Nvidia proprietary drivers from RPM Fusion. Relatively painless install, with the option to sign the kernel module if you want to keep secure boot on. Only downside is the Nvidia drivers still don’t work great with Wayland, so I normally login with Gnome on X for gaming.