I’ve installed Debian Linux on over 50 devices by now. A vanilla configuration with GNOME works pretty much out of the box for me on a high-end desktop with a modern NVIDIA graphics card.
I’d say the biggest part of the learning curve is figuring out which apps are good and suitable for what you’re trying to do. Just like with Windows and macOS and Android and iOS, there’s only a handful of viable options among an overwhelming sea of poor ones.
There are many wrong ways to install NVIDIA on any given Linux distro and architecture, and only one functional way. As others here are saying, that’s on NVIDIA, not you or Linux.
General advice: whenever possible, strongly prefer your distro’s standard package manager to install things over any other method. With Ubuntu, I believe that’s either apt or snap.
Also: if you find yourself poking around in some obscure system internals while troubleshooting an issue, you probably took a wrong turn somewhere.
In years past, I’ve used Elasticsearch and Kibana. The learning curve is steep and the system resource requirements warrant a dedicated machine, but once you get it dialed, it’s really effective as a centralized logging server.
Prometheus and Grafana are for time-series data (metrics), not logs. If you’re already getting that from netdata, don’t bother with these, as they’d be redundant with what you have.
syslog is about as idiomatic as it gets for log management in linux, but i don’t have enough experience using it effectively to give any pointers there. If you don’t really know what you want, yet, and just want to collect logs from all the things and see them in one place so you can begin to try and make sense of them and make refinements from there, then syslog seems like an excellent place to start.