Nvidia gpus require proprietary drivers that are only provided for specific distros and are only supported for a small amount of time. And if you find any bug well tough luck, nobody can help you. For a work setup that you rely on someone else in the company for support they might be fine but I wouldn't recommend them for a personal setup.
All this is on top of the fact that they still don't support Wayland and you have to reboot to switch between the igpu and the nvidia gpu.
10 years of support on the latest driver branch (current branch goes back to the 600 series, and the 400 series was dropped in June) doesn’t exactly seem like a small amount of time.
>Last time I looked, it was perfectly possible to install them directly, without support by the distro. Yes, it's more work.
Yes, you can install them and they will break with every single update and you need to re-install them. And you will encounter bugs that no-one has any idea why they are there and no-one will help you with.
>There's an open source driver, nouveau, but of course it's behind the newest hardware.
It's not just behind, it's actively sabotaged by nvidia by locking basic hardware functions behind closed firmware that it encrypted.
All this is on top of the fact that they still don't support Wayland and you have to reboot to switch between the igpu and the nvidia gpu.