A nightmare how? When i used their cards, I'd just download the .run and run it. Done.

And when it doesn't work, what do you do then?

Exactly, that's when the nightmare starts.

After a reboot of coarse :)

Everything breaks immediately otherwise.

From my limited experience with their open-sourcing of kernel modules so far: It doesn't make things easier; but - the silver lining is that, for the most part, it doesn't make installation and configuration harder! Which is no small thing actually.