Correction: POP!_OS has their own APT deb farm that has the latest hardware stack. This includes the proprietary 535 nvidia driver and later as well as the kernel and mesa.
This is part of the history of the distribution as it was made to support system76's latest hardware lineup on top of an Ubuntu base.
Nouveau is the libre driver for Nvidia on GNU/Linux with Nvidia slowly segregating their proprietary driver into a firmware blob.
The first thing I installed windows on was an discarded office tower that I had to put new memory And hard drives in. Shit was ancient and specifically did not want anything but windows installed on it. Installed Linux anyway. Works great. No specific hardware
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.