People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but... that hasn't been true for years?

Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot... that's it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you're not running a .exe, but that's true for any package.