Have worked fine for a damn long time with the caveat of wayland, including the last time I ran desktop Linux with my old 2060.

Are you on a laptop? I game on desktop on Linux just fine with Nvidia drivers.

I wonder if rise of Linux gaming will force Nvidia to change its ways

Yeah, if you plan on playing games on (or running) Linux at all, you need to get an AMD card. Pretty much non-negotiable at the current time.

I hear this constantly but have been using Nvidia cards (with proprietary drivers) for years on Linux with zero problems.

If you want to ((use open-source drivers OR use wayland) AND play demanding games), that's true, AMD hardware is probably a better choice, but: - if you're fine with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and Xorg, Nvidia hardware works great; - if you play less demanding games, Intel hardware works great.

Steam and protondb really helps mitigate this. My Nvidia card that could run games well on Windows ran them acceptably on Ubuntu on steam. No extra setup or work, steam did it all. I believe via vulkan drivers and proton but I'm not 100% sure. And this was a few years ago

3080 using nvidia's 510 drivers work just fine here.

Maybe non-negotiable a few years ago. I've been playing just fine with a laptop and its builtin Intel GPU.