You might have actually had an easier time on a nerdy arch or Gentoo setup. The Nouveau driver is heroically reverse-engineered by volunteers, and distros that ship with more recent versions of the Linux kernel might include additional features or bugfixes your hardware may need. This is specially relevant if you happen to be using a recently-released video card.

These days having to fiddle with drivers on Linux is a rarer and rarer occasion. I haven't had to worry about this ever since I ditched my NVIDIA card a couple of years ago.