Once upon a time, when I was waiting for the delivery of the just-announced AMD Vega - which took a while, due to interest miners had in AMD GPUs at the time - I had a loaner GTX1080.

I can tell you, it was not something that worked OOTB. Distributions that shipped Nouveau at least did boot into GUI, but since I have 4k display, it was extremely slow. Unusable slow. It is not due to Nouveau not trying; they couldn't ship the signed firmware files they needed for reclocking.

So after switching to lower-resolution mode, I was able to install the system. Then I could install the proprietary driver. Aside the fact that it ignores Linux APIs/doesn't play nice with Wayland (what would you say about driver for Windows, that ignores WDDM and instead ships it's own display server?), it worked quite nice... until the first kernel update. So yeah, DKMS took the care about rebuild, it just took extra time at the first boot with the new kernel, and I could only hope that the new kernel doesn't break whatever building the shim expects, leaving me with a text console and taking next hour or two for me fixing it. Or that something else breaks, like that nvidia update, that killed X server in the process, which took down the terminal with yum that was running that update, resulting in me spending about two hours fixing the resulting mess. Another downsides were that I had to install compiler tools (which I usually do not have installed, or at least not outside of containers) and telling bye-bye to Secure Boot. So yes, it works, if you tinker. Not the kind of tinkering because you are in the mood, but the kind of tinkering that you have to, because something broke again.

Contrast that with AMD or Intel cards: they work out of the box with any modern distribution. You don't have to install anything; everything needed is already part of the distro. You can also update your system without fear, that something breaks, the updates come with your system updates, modules are signed by your distro and load in Secure Boot mode. Wrt. drivers, it is a Mac-like experience, you can forget that anything called drivers exists, stuff just works. It is something I can give to my parents, leave updates enabled and still be assured, that it won't break exactly at the time I cannot visit them and fix stuff for them.

And it is something that the Linux community can't do anything about. Nvidia keeps their cards close to the chest and won't allow the community to improve the situation. There's a reason why Linus has shown Nvidia the finger.

So in the closing: unless we two have vastly different ideas about what works out of the box means, no, Nvidia doesn't work out of the box. All the people gaming and running CUDA with Nvidia have to tinker.