Only sort of, quoting this article

much of the important graphics code isn’t actually open-source. Nvidia appears to have moved much of its proprietary code into the firmware on its graphics cards, which the open-source code interacts with.

So while they did ‘open source’ their drivers, theyre also not accepting contributions that aren’t in house. The codebase is too locked down to benefit other projects like NVK, as a true FOSS project would be.

Bit of misinformation on this thread, but generally the only thing that can actually get in the way of someone dedicated enough will be compatibility and security systems.

You probably won’t have any luck getting nvidia drivers on android for example, nor take the time to back port those drivers to an outdated kernel.

I suppose you could also have an OS that takes most your system resources for non-gaming tasks, making games unplayable. Something like nixos is non-gaming centric and could reasonably be more optimised than bazzite, less background processes making games actually run better on it.

That being said if youre looking for performance, the last thing you’d want is open source nvidia drivers; theyre built entirely off reverse engineering, which takes time. This allows for large performance gains like those of late.

The proprietary stack hasn’t had much change in performance over the last couple updates, a couple have even result in a performance regression to push new features. As of the latest preview driver (565.77) the minimum kernel supported goes back to the 4.15 Linux kernel release. This technically means you’d be able to run the latest nvidia drivers on anything newer than Debian 10 buster, which went out of support in September 2022.

Sounds like you might have gotten some of your info sources crossed - but thats exactly why distros like Bazzite exist, you dont have to worry about any of this background compatibility bs.