I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.

>poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.

I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.

Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.