Do you use Ubuntu LTS? If so, then indeed Nvidia is not a problem.

But if you run a distro that has anywhere near new kernels such as Fedora and Arch, you'll be constantly in fear of receiving new kernel updates. And every so often the packages will be broken and you'll have to use Nvidia's horrible installer. Oh and every once in a while they'll subtly drop support for older cards and you'll need to move to the legacy package, but the way you'll find out is that your system suddenly doesn't boot and you just happen to think about it being the old Nvidia card so you Kagi that and discover the change.

I found it much easier to make ROCm/AMD work for AI (including on an laptop) than getting nvidia work with Xorg on an optimus laptop with an intel iGPU/nvidia dGPU. I swore off nvidia at that point.

Changing kernels automatically as new releases came out was never an optimal strategy even if its what you get by default in Arch. Notably arch has linux-lts presently at 6.6 whereas mainline is 6.7.

Instead of treating it like a dice roll and living in existential dread at the entirely predictable peril of Linus cutting releases that necessarily occasionally front run NVIDIA which releases less frequently I simply don't install kernels first released yesterday, pull in major kernel version updates daily, don't remove the old kernel automatically when the new one is installed, and automatically make snapshots on update against any sort of issue that might obtain.

If that seems like too much work one could simply at least keep the prior kernel version around and reboot and your only out 45 seconds of your life. This actually seems like a good idea no matter what.

I don't think I have used nvidia's installer since 2003 on Fedora "Core"–as the nomenclature used to be—One. One simply doesn't need to. Also generally speaking one doesn't need to use a legacy package until a card is over 10 years old. For instance the oldest consumer card unsupported right now is a 600 series from 2012.

If you still own a 2012 GPU you should probably put it where it belongs in the trash but when you get to the sort of computers that require legacy support which is 2009-2012 you are apt to need to worry about other matters like distros that still support 32 bit, simple environments like xfce, software that works well in ram constrained environments. Needing to install a slightly different driver seems tractable.

Try to use the runfile provided by Nvidia and use DKMS. The biggest issue is just that flatpaks aren't really updated for CUDA drivers, but you can just not use them if your distro isn't old or niche.