I've been on linux for years, I work the Nvidia libraries all the time, I alternate booting wayland and X... I even use my AMD IGP as output these days, instead of the Nvidia card.
And I STILL hold my breath wondering if I'm going to get a blackscreen, and have to go into tty mode or boot from a usb stick to investigate and fix it.
I... have had an NVIDIA 2080ti since they are sold (so.. about 6 years?) and use it daily, gaming, using it for selfhosting AI a bit with CUDA and... just works, from gaming to tinkering. I don't get those comments. Sorry you had such a bad experience, it's not mine.
Same thing here. There was a big update earlier this year that made it so I can use Wayland, where before that, it was impossible. At this point, I can't tell you the last time I've had any GPU related issues. Further, I believe that Nvidia is now working with Linux for driver support, so it should get even better going forward.
IF you are a distro hopper try openSUSE, nVidia maintains a repo on their own servers for the SUSE/OpenSUSE drivers. I have not had any GPU issues for 7 years.
Works pretty well on pop!_os (with X) barring some oddities that I'm not even sure are specific to Nvidia cards (like the compositor losing its shit when I try to pop out a video from my browser and put it over a game's window)
I've been lucky then, only problems I'm having (Wayland + NVidia) are:
Steam menu corruption, mostly on friends window (can be solved by maximising window)
Maximising browser on my second screen results in not all the screen being used, but buttons react as if they were using the whole screen (so you're not clicking where you think you are). Solution is to resize window to maximum manually. Minor annoyance.
Oh and I disabled stand-by entirely. It's was 50/50 if it would return from it. I think most problems are because I have mismatched resolutions (1080 and 1440).
That 2nd monitor window thing sounds like a DPI scaling issue, especially if your main screen has different scaling than the one causing issues. I get this a lot at work because of my setup and the software I use (on windows btw) and I got so used to manually moving the window and smashing it against the top of the screen to maximize it that I don't really mind. But maybe the term can help you troubleshoot it further
Yeah some softwares are also just bad at handling this stuff on startup I guess. Visual studio fucks up the code window's scaling all the time for me. UE4 used to literally never open a window with the correct scaling on my second (smaller) monitor window too but it got a lot better with UE5
In the screen, where you type your password to log into your computer, there is an option to choose which of the installed desktop environments / window manager you want to use.
On gnome standard login screen, it is down in the right corner, but there are many of this “lock screens” available and each can place the dropdown(or dropup, lol) anywhere they want. Just search your screen where you have to type your password to login for options.