I’m new to Linux from about 3 months ago, so it’s been a bit of a learning curve on top to learning VE haha. I didn’t realize CUDA had versions

Yeah... it's not you. I'm a professional developer and have been using Linux for decades. It's still hard for me to install specific environments. Sometimes it just works... but often I give up. Sometimes it's my mistake but sometimes it's also because the packaging is not actually reproducible. It works on the setup that the developer used, great for them, but slight variation throw you right into dependency hell.