I would say Nvidia historically (10+ years) had great support for Linux.
They were officially releasing drivers with feature parity to Windows. To get real manufacturer supported drivers, for a GPU none the less, was a breath of fresh air. This was in the era of having to be careful what wifi card you choose.
Sure, you had to manually install the drivers, which was not the norm with Linux, but that was still the case with Windows too. It wasn't until Windows 7 that "search for a driver" feature in Windows actually did something.
It's really only been recently, with AMD releasing official GPU drivers for the kernel, that things have changed. If you were putting a GPU in a Linux computer 10 years ago it absolutely would have been Nvidia.
Andrew May
It's estimated his loose lips sank 10 ships and killed 800 servicemen.
Unrelated, he was convicted of accepting bribes as a Congressman. He gave a lucrative contact to a company with no experience producing munitions, then opened a lumber business and sold that same munitions company excessively expensive crates as the way to receive his kickback. The reason is came to light was because the munitions company produced defective artillery shells that prematurely exploded and killed at least 38 soldiers. Served 9 months before Truman pardoned him.