That is odd. I’ve been using NVIDIA and haven’t really had any issues apart from just installing the proprietary driver through the package manager. People like to make out that NVIDIA is really bad on Linux, but lately it’s been pretty good. My Quadro ~10 year old Quadro M2000 is still supported by the latest driver. Same cannot be said for more recent AMD APUs (looking at you Vega 10).

Maybe next time you try Linux try Fedora since it has more recent drivers, etc. Just make sure you follow the instructions to install the NVIDIA proprietary drivers from RPMFusion. https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

Otherwise PopOS is apparently good since it bundles the NVIDIA driver with the iso. It’s just been a bit buggy in my experience.