The current official Nvidia driver is known to cause problems during install, during system updates or basically whenever it feels like it (when using Wayland, after hibernation, on rainy days…). Even the most well maintained distros regularly struggle with it, ran into trouble on both Mint and OpenSuse myself in the past.

If you don’t have your distro already I’d suggest trying one that comes with the Nvidia driver preinstalled (they then also usually take care of all the small adjustments). Saves you some headache.

Those I can currently think off that ship the proprietary driver (in no particular order): ZorinOS, Pop!_OS, Nobara, Bazzite, EndeavourOS, TuxedoOS, SlimbookOS

I use Nvidia on Linux for over a decade now, never had a problem. Using the official closed source drivers. I don’t know if AMD is better because I never tried it myself, but in my experience Nvidia is working as well as on Windows.

This is on desktop, I don’t know about laptops. My experience is also limited to gaming, maybe it’s bad for CUDA or something.

The drivers have gotten a lot better over the last few years, and Nvidia even have an official open-source driver now, but there’s still issues with them. Wayland works very well now, but not perfectly (especially on GPUs with low VRAM).

If you’re on Linux and are buying a new GPU, stick to AMD. Their driver is part of the Linux kernel, it’s more stable, and it gets all the newest features first.