Magmarock: Exactly so I thought I could just import an image from system to another. Unfortunately not. You might be able to move the hard drive from one system to another, but if you import an image from say a small virtual system to a larger system you're going to have problems. Futhermore I don't think even hard drive moving will work well if you've installed nvidia drivers. In my experience it can break the system.
Nah, not virtual systems - real systems. The case that you describe: move with filesystem grow/shrink is correctly problematic, but its problematic on all OSes and difficulty comes from the actual filesystem driver capabilities and type of filesystems. The OS type, I don't think it plays any major role here, they all may have own nuances. :) Sure, some FS are PIA to work, but thats usually the payback for features they allow. Simple FS are easy to grow/shrink.
Still, I don't think you'll ever need to do this anymore, as its much faster to either move images, or move configuration into newly prepaired FS with different geometry and then allow the system to assemble itself, than to mess with filesystem geometries. :)
My experience at least says that I never ever had to deal with FS shinking/growing during migration at all.
You probably mean that properietary Nvidia split the userspace driver into different versions, because thats how they support different card generations. Well, if you know the driver version, you just have to replace the nvidia package - until then, the system boots into VESA. If you have Linux distro with some autodetect layer, then it will automatically replace. AFAIK its actually same in Windows then, unsuprising nvidia is author of both drivers.
In nix, the system should autodetect correct package name, pull and install it, while automatically releasing the older package. During this process it creates a new generation, so you can move back anytime within package sets until you garbage-collect. Yes, but you must enable proprietary software visibility though and add "nvidia" to packages, or it will assume you are ok with nouveau.
I am okay with nouveau though, but its the only nvidia IGP I have though, and its on media server. All my machines are Intel or AMD/Radeon, both foss :)