I think that installation was originally 18.04 and I installed it when it was released. A while ago anyways and I've been upgrading it as new versions roll out and with the latest upgrade and snapd software it has become more and more annoying to keep the operating system happy and out of my way so I can do whatever I need to do on the computer.
Snap updates have been annoying and they randomly (and temporarily) broke stuff while some update process was running on background, but as whole reinstallation is a pain in the rear I have just swallowed the annoyance and kept the thing running.
But now today, when I planned that I'd spend the day with paperwork and other "administrative" things I've been pushing off due to life being busy, I booted the computer and primary monitor was dead, secondary has resolution of something like 1024x768, nvidia drivers are absent and usability in general just isn't there.
After couple of swear words I thought that ok, I'll fix this, I'll install all the updates and make the system happy again. But no. That's not going to happen, at least not very easily.
I'm running LUKS encryption and thus I have a separate boot -partition. 700MB of it. I don't remember if installer recommended that or if I just threw some reasonable sounding amount on the installer. No matter where that originally came from, it should be enough (this other ubuntu I'm writing this with has 157MB stored on /boot). I removed older kernels, but still the installer claims that I need at least 480MB (or something like that) free space on /boot, but the single kernel image, initrd and whatever crap it includes consumes 280MB (or so). So apt just fails on upgrade as it can't generate new initrd or whatever it tries to do.
So I grabbed my ventoy-drive, downloaded latest mint ISO on it and instead of doing something productive I planned to do I'll spend couple of hours at reinstalling the whole system. It'll be quite a while before I install ubuntu on anything.
And it's not just this one broken update, like I mentioned I've had a lot of issues with the setup and at least majority of them is caused by ubuntu and it's package management. This was just a tipping point to finally leave that abusive relationship with my tool and set it up so that I can actually use it instead of figuring out what's broken now and next.
In general, consider setting up any kind of rollback functionality; this will enable you to get right back to action without any downtime when you're time-restricted. This can be achieved by configuring your system with (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper. Please bear in mind that it's likely that you have to come back to solve it eventually, though*. (Perhaps it's worth thinking about what can be done to ensure that you don't end up with a broken system in the first place. *cough* ~'immutable'~ ~distro~ *cough*)
If this seems too troublesome to setup, then consider using distros that have this properly setup from the get-go by default; like (in alphabetical order) Garuda Linux, Manjaro, Nobara, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa/Leap/Slowroll/Tumbleweed, siduction and SpiralLinux. Furthermore, so-called 'immutable' distros also have rollback functionality while not relying on aforementioned (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper; this applies to e.g. blendOS, Fedora Kinoite/Sericea/Silverblue, Guix, NixOS and Vanilla OS.
If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of choice, then you should probably consider the bold ones; not because I think they're necessarily better but:
While any of the aforementioned distros do a decent job at 'supporting' Nvidia, perhaps you might be best off with uBlue's Nvidia images. As these are images relying on the same technology that Fedora's immutable distros do, rollback functionality and all the other good stuff we've come to love -like automatic upgrades in the background- are present as well. In case you're interested to know how these actually provide improved Nvidia support:
"We've slipstreamed the Nvidia drivers right onto the operating system image. Steps that once took place on your local laptop are now done in a continuous integration system in GitHub. Once they are complete, the system stamps out an image which then makes its way to your PC.
No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We've fully automated it so that if there's an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone.
But it's not just installation and configuration: We provide Nvidia driver versions 525, 520, and 470 for each of these. You can atomically switch between any of these, so if your driver worked perfectly on a certain day and you find a regression you just rebase to that image.
Or switch to another desktop entirely.
No other desktop Linux does this, and we're just getting started."
Source
Great post. However, I will add my opinion about Debian Sid and its lineage: just don't use them for production. Sid is an unstable distribution that looks like a rolling release distribution and most of the time it's fine, but it is fundamentally different since it's okay if it gets broken.
I'm guessing the idea behind Siduction is to use this rollback functionality to counter its innate instability, but with solid alternatives like openSUSE or the already installed Linux Mint + Timeshift, I wouldn't recommend Siduction. Also, Manjaro is unstable by design, wouldn't recommend that one either.
I personally agree with your assessments regarding Debian Sid and Manjaro. However, I didn't want to force my (potential) 'bias' in a comment that tries to be otherwise neutral. Thank you for bringing up the 'asterisks' associated with both of these!