I would like to reiterate something important that is not quite being understood by many.
We do not “support” packages from the non-free repository. No distro does in their equivalent repositories. This is because the source is proprietary. Every single distro makes their best effort to offer it as a convenience for the majority of people that would use it. This means, someone with a known compatible PC using it in a predictable manner. The more peripherals and requirements added to this scenario, the greater the likelihood of bugs and issues.
Since we cannot fix bugs related to software in the non-free repo, we can only make our best effort to provide the latest version of the software to go with the latest versions of the FOSS software we package that may talk to it (i.e. the kernel).
Now I’d like to explain things so we can start approaching some realistic expectations.
nvidia drivers are broken on every release. They regularly need to be patched for them to work both themselves, and with newer kernel releases. You can see what that looks like here:
Other distros that “just work,” actually do not. They spend money on people internally and hardware to test their packages on and deliver to the user absolutely every single configuration imaginable to cover every single hardware scenario imaginable which ends up bloating the system. We don’t have the resources nor the desire to provide that to pretend to support software we cannot modify the source code for.
Drivers older than 5xx will not be supported on kernel 6.x.x, and the open driver will not be backported to cards older than GTX 16xx. This means we also cannot offer any of the legacy drivers for cards. nvidia wants the open driver to be used as the default, but the userland is still proprietary. Until it is opened, every distro will have to work around that limitation. The ones getting most of the money will probably succeed, and will probably do so by packaging older versions of the driver while testing the newer versions away from most users.
So, for us it’s a catch-22. Offer a driver that works but lacks features, or offer the newest to go along with the newest kernels. Given all of the conditions I just mentioned, we have a very high success rate for average use scenarios (i.e. store bought or boutique desktop PC with a physical VGA adapter, or a notebook with non-hybrid setup). The other challenge is that people show up wanting it to work, but don’t want to help us get it working by submitting their hardware and issue to nvidia and bringing us the feedback they get from nvidia. Granted, they are slow to respond, if at all. Our hands are tied in this situation.
The last thing I can suggest for people that have tried everything else, is to download their driver binary from the website and see if the results are any better installing that. We will still suggest you contact nvidia when you have issues, but that will at least rule out for you (and them) if there is any contributing factors from our packaging or not.