The only issue that I have ever had with drivers is when the ubuntu automatic install defaulted to the latest open source ones which weren't being recognized.
For a whole bunch of other installations, following official linux instructions on Nvidia works incredibly well. Im probably up to like 30 installs of linux mint on laptops and desktops, without issues. I had a personal laptop with manjaro that suppored nvidia prime, I didn't even have to do anything special, just installed nvidia-smi, and prime-run worked out of the box.
And generally, for equal comparison, I wouldn't consider laptops with discrete graphics to be in the same family as more business oriented Macs, the more apt comparison would be those with AMD chips with integrated video drivers, for which you don't need to fuck with any drivers.
I don't know maybe I've just been unlucky, but at least for me on a couple of different laptops I regularly get full desktop freezes on Debian & Fedora from using things like VMs / GPU accelerated browser (Chrome) / Other things (I don't actually use CUDA/AI much at all but I suspect the issues come from sharing of GPU resources across apps, could be wrong)
This doesn't happen on Windows nearly as much on the same laptops, I don't use Macs that much. And yes I agree it does seem more of an issue with laptops with discrete graphics.
I do still use Linux desktop a lot, I'm happy to take the trade-off but my point was just that depending on the work you do, or the features of the laptop you want to use, like power mgmt or bluetooth, there will be tinkering. (and yes this is entirely manufacturers fault)
For a whole bunch of other installations, following official linux instructions on Nvidia works incredibly well. Im probably up to like 30 installs of linux mint on laptops and desktops, without issues. I had a personal laptop with manjaro that suppored nvidia prime, I didn't even have to do anything special, just installed nvidia-smi, and prime-run worked out of the box.
And generally, for equal comparison, I wouldn't consider laptops with discrete graphics to be in the same family as more business oriented Macs, the more apt comparison would be those with AMD chips with integrated video drivers, for which you don't need to fuck with any drivers.