Great post. I feel the same. I look at the heroics done to make the linux Intel and AMD drivers work, and it seems like the current nvidia driver is far simpler. Eg, a binary blob with native wrappers. The only time it breaks is when the wrappers are stale; eg the kernel APIs that it depends on have changed. I run current, and I've only had an issue around the driver failing to compile or run correctly a handful of times in 2 decades, which is saying a lot for an out-of-tree driver.
Absolutely. And those hoops that occasionally happened through the years would happen to any 3rd party kmod package, regardless.
Nowadays for workstation usage RELEASE is good because it has quarterly. No need to track other branches to stay current with the packages, 4 times per year is enough for 99.9% of desktop users. So those kmod hoops are largely gone.
