Yep! Could I make it work if I had the time? Probably. I might have just gotten unlucky with my previous attempt, or it didn't like my specific GPU (or it was actually a different component that was causing the problem, despite all the error messages pointing to GPU). But Linux definitely isn't in "it just works" stage for everyone, and for every person who can say it worked fine out of the box, there's someone else who can say it wouldn't work no matter what they did. The hardware combinations for desktops, especially self-built ones, is nearly infinite, and some combinations will be more finicky than others.