Time to not go for HP
Time to not go for HP! I would not pay a Microsoft license just to use it as a hypervisor to run Linux. I don't want the support issues of supporting a whole copy of Windows, just to have it running as a hypervisor that I'm running Linux on. I don't want the slowdowns of having network and disk I/O go through 2 sets of drivers and 2 disk caches for such an unncessary reason. I don't want the support headache of making sure a copy of Windows is fully patched, updated, and secured, to have it phone home, to have it decide on it's own schedule that it's going to reboot or do background tasks and on and on. Finally, it's pretty inefficient to have Windows using all that disk space, generating all that disk I/O (you know it won't resist indexing and whatever the hell else in the background), and using all those GBs of RAM, (plus the inefficiency of having to statically allocate some fixed amount to the Linux VM) when you JUST want to run Linux on it.
And, really, the NVidia driver situation is pretty easy. It sounds bad when summed up like in the article but it's not bad at all. If your distro has it, then install the nvidia package. If your distro doesn't have it (or you want to download it directly from NVidia instead of your distro's packaged version), then download the one from NVidia and run the installer. If it complains, quit running a bleeding edge kernel. Most distros DO NOT run a bleeding edge kernel unless you install one manually (right now that's 5.15.2), they run one that's had a few months for bugs to be worked out, and those few months give nvidia time to get their driver up and running too (for example the "edge" kernel in Ubuntu is 5.13.0-21, 2 series behind the bleeding edge and "regular" kernel's a bit older (with bug fixes backported from newer series).). It's true that older drivers for old cards do not support new kernels, but those drivers are for like Geforce 4 series and older; anything that supports CUDA will work on the current driver. As far as I know noveau is actually feature-complete on these old cards. the support missing from noveau for CUDA, Vulkan, and newer OpenGL features are not supported by these older cards anyway.