[Pokepokalypse]

ha.

Had all those same problems with an ATI-chipped laptop.

Your problems were not nvidia-specific.

Also: Windows has supported bash for a very long time - under Cygwin. (also Cygwin used to have pretty decent community support, back in the 1990's).

I'll say this also: Ubuntu is probably the EASIEST distro to get into a working state; with either Nvidia or ATI. (the proprietary drivers have their warts - but the worst are in their installers) ... (as long as you aren't itching to get special features working, like power management, or switching, etc - those things DO work, and CAN be made to work, with given chipsets, and kernels, and driver revs - if you're smart, and lucky... for the rest of us, there's the open source drivers, which are generally pretty good, and have gotten MUCH better over the past 10 years).

[saas_co_de]

I have been using ubuntu daily for the past 7 years with very few issues.

If you can buy a laptop that is known to work that is best. If you have existing hardware then it is sort of a crapshoot.

Desktop is easier. Just stick to intel (CPU, iGPU, ethernet, and wireless) and you will have no problems at all, and even with some realtek and broadcom stuff thrown in it usually works.

[kevin_thibedeau]

There's also Msys/GnuWin which is of similar age to Cygwin and avoids some of the interoperability issues Cygwin apps have.