To be fair, Nvidia support on Linux has been historically quite poor, with users having to manually install drivers (something the average person shouldn’t have to think about). Though even that has gotten much better recently, with Debian now allowing forks to have proprietary drivers built in.
I would say Nvidia historically (10+ years) had great support for Linux.
They were officially releasing drivers with feature parity to Windows. To get real manufacturer supported drivers, for a GPU none the less, was a breath of fresh air. This was in the era of having to be careful what wifi card you choose.
Sure, you had to manually install the drivers, which was not the norm with Linux, but that was still the case with Windows too. It wasn’t until Windows 7 that “search for a driver” feature in Windows actually did something.
It’s really only been recently, with AMD releasing official GPU drivers for the kernel, that things have changed. If you were putting a GPU in a Linux computer 10 years ago it absolutely would have been Nvidia.
By the way, Ubuntu and probably most Ubuntu-based distros (like Linux Mint) also have driver manager (ubuntu-drivers) that handles drivers similarly to the “search for driver” feature. Except that ubuntu-drivers also let’s you select between multiple drivers and let’s you easily uninstall them.
If you’re getting a prebuilt (which most people do) then drivers will be preinstalled.
I misread your comment, I’m super tired. But afaik pop has been the only distro to have an ISO with Nvidia drivers built in for years now, I think
