To be honest, from my point of view, Nvidia tends to provide better support for its components on Linux systems than its competitors. This is because many older cards are still being updated to support the latest versions of Xorg.
And this I have personally verified, since I am a user of ATI and Nvidia, but well this is not the point of the issue.
What is clear to me is that many times new users don't dare to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers out of fear, even those with more experience, since they regularly encounter a very common problem: the infamous black screen.
Fortunately for Ubuntu users, there are third-party PPAs that provide Nvidia graphics drivers and keep them updated for installation.
The PPA is currently in the testing phase, but you can still get working Nvidia drivers from here.
Installation of the Nvidia drivers.
Something you should always know is which is the latest version of the Nvidia driver available for your graphics card.
If you are not sure about them, you can visit the Nvidia page where they will look for their model and choose Linux as the system, after which it will take them to the download page of the binary and they will be able to see there which is the version of the most current driver for your graphics.
Once this information is known, it is necessary to ensure that any previous installation is removed, if present. To do this, simply run the following command:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia *
Having done this, we now need to add the repository to our system . To do this, we must open a terminal and run the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers
We update our list of repositories with:
sudo apt-get update
Now if you know what the version of the driver for your card is, you simply indicate it with the following command, this is merely an example:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-370
Otherwise, we will have to go to our applications menu and look for “ Software and Updates” and additional drivers.
Here it will show us a list of the available drivers, where we can choose the one we like, even though the recommended one is always the most current.
Now, here's a part that everyone skips and is the main cause of black screens: after the installation is complete, open a terminal and run :
lsmod | grep nvidia
If there is no output, then your installation has probably failed. It is also possible that the driver is not available in the system driver database.
You can run the following command to check if your system is running on the open source nouveau driver.
If the output is negative for nouveau, all is well with your installation.
lsmod | grep nouveau
Now that the installation is complete, it is necessary to add the free drivers to a blacklist so that they do not conflict with the newly installed ones.
To create this blacklist, we will run the following command :
nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
And in it we are going to add the following.
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off
At the end we must save the changes.
And we are ready to restart the computer.
Another cause is the automatic installation of minor version updates, this usually happens when we run an apt upgrade.
To avoid this, just enter the following command, taking into account that this is your base version.
sudo apt-mark hold nvidia-370
How to uninstall the Nvidia drivers?
We just have to execute the following command:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia *
And remove the Nouveau drivers from the black list described above and execute:
sudo apt-get install nouveau-firmware
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
We reboot for the changes to take effect and with that we return again to the free drivers.