I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it's about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it's 982 mods that I can't be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it's the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you're wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.
No, it has not „always been fine” - I’ve worked with people who disabled auto updates on their dev machines just to keep a specific kernel & driver version working together. Circa 2016 :)
I was indeed setting up nvidia and cuda for ML around 2018 and it was not as straight forward or easy as it is today. It was quite annoying and error prone, at least for me who was setting it up on my own for the first time.