I'm not sure where you developed that understanding. NVidia drivers and CUDA are trivial to set up on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS/RHEL). If you use a different distro, you might have a little more work to do, but even that is running a single script that you pull down from NVidia.

Some distros maintain packages with 3-6 month update cycle (Ubuntu), so you don't even need to bypass the normal management paradigm. This is sometimes a problem for corporate controlled systems, where you are not allowed to install packages/drivers/etc.

For me, I've been running NVidia cards on Linux on desktop and laptop systems since 2006. If you can't use the command line, Linux systems will generally be somewhat more work than windows systems, but not by much.

To keep this in context of FBSD, I've used FBSD11 and 12 for a number of things, including development build targets, potential hypervisor based systems.

FBSD is an opinionated system. When you run into an FBSD opinion (say, where include directories and libraries sit), and this doesn't mesh well with a configuration/build system, using FBSD winds up being a fairly frustrating experience.

The positives about FBSD from my experience are, fundamentally, the bootloader is much better than grub/grub2, from a UX perspective. I know that's a low bar, but really, grub is terrible.

The negatives, and I am sure this will result in downvotes, but I am being open on this here, are some members of the community with a chip on their shoulders. You can see that here in the comments about "hey we can do X, and linux can't." I've confronted many of those (often but not always, incorrect) biases during my second to last job, from people who ought to know better. It was tiring having to deal with that crap.

FBSD has some interesting tech with it. (Puts on management hat) The hard reality is that unless this tech is so massively compelling, that companies can cast the remaining negatives as being less important to their individual value analysis, I don't expect FBSD to gain or even maintain market share. (Takes off management hat)

I've made the same points about SmartOS/Illumos. It doesn't matter how much you like something, if you can't show that it is compellingly better to a large swath of people/companies, chances are you just won't see wide spread adoption/replacement.

Moreover, a companies job is to make money for its owners. I've worked at companies that had some aspect of their engineering and management team blind to this. They thought that their job was to provide a home/advocacy base for their platform, rather than turn that platform into the absolute best version of itself. This wasn't FBSD, but the trajectory of this organization was sadly predictable. They had some great tech. But it was wrapped up in a culture that could not adapt. Similar to the FBSD people I indicated, they had a fairly massive chip on their shoulders, which prevented them from taking their real and valuable tech, and making it wide spread.

That was a shame.

So now, we have Windows and Linux, with the latter completely dominating clouds/containers and ML/AI, and only MSFT still pushing Windows at Azure. I don't see FBSD doing much more than being an appliance OS over the long haul.