Ubuntu – Can’t activate proprietary driver for NVIDIA from “Additional drivers” Ubuntu 14.04

To install just check one of them, you will see a bar in the lower right conner, when it's done the driver is installed.

As MrVavkadii said, the highers numbers are newer, in your case, 331.38.

You have all these option cuz sometimes they don't work so you have mirrors to download them from.

Binary driver is the normal one. Legacy binary driver is the ones that nVidia don't have avaible in the site to download anymore. Xorg driver is the one made to be compatible to your OS, while it is opensource and made by users.

Proprietary are the ones made by nVidia Proprietary (tested) is the one that will most of the times work at your system, so is the first choice you should make. Open source means you can see and edit the driver.

Still newbie, but I had the same question some days ago and searched for info... If someone see that I'm saying **** please say.

In ubuntu 16.04, if Software & Updates -> Additional Drivers, is started from menu or Unity launcher, choosing a proprietary driver doesn't work. Upon selecting a new driver and clicking apply changes, progress bar moves forward for sometime, then goes back and the previous driver is selected again.

It looks like the issue is that Software & Updates is initialized without super user privileges. The solution is, open a terminal and type:

$ sudo software-properties-gtk

And type password if required. Then select the proprietary driver and click apply changes.

This method solved me the problem.

PS : Edited after seeing the comments.