Drivers – How to Install Nvidia 387 Drivers on Kubuntu 18.04

18.04driversnvidia

I'm using Kubuntu 18.04 and have the Nvidia 396 driver installed. It "feels" quite glitchy, and I'd like to try to the Nvidia 387 driver. I tried removing 396 using:

sudo apt remove --purge nvidia-*
sudo apt update
sudo apt autoremove

I then tried to install the Nvidia 387 drivers using:

sudo apt install nvidia-387

However, it just installed the Nvidia 390 drivers!?

Any idea how I can install the Nvidia 387 drivers?

Best Answer

There aren't any nvidia-387 packages in the default 18.04 repos. The closest match to nvidia-387 in 18.04 can be installed as follows:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall # installs nvidia-driver-390   
sudo reboot

When installing an Nvidia proprietary graphics driver, it is not necessary to uninstall the nouveau open source graphics driver. The two graphics drivers can be installed alongside each other allowing the open source graphics driver to be used as a fallback alternative in case there is a problem using the proprietary graphics driver.

The autoinstall command of ubuntu-drivers installs drivers that are appropriate for automatic installation including their dependencies.

There also isn't a package named nvidia-390 in the default Ubuntu 18.04 repositories as the results of apt show nvidia-390 shows:

$ apt show nvidia-390
Package: nvidia-390
State: not a real package (virtual)
N: Can't select candidate version from package nvidia-390 as it has no candidate
N: Can't select versions from package 'nvidia-390' as it is purely virtual
N: No packages found
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