For many years I have installed nvidia proprietary driver manually installing only 4 packages and everything works fine: nvidia-xxx, libcuda1, nvidia-opencl-icd and nvidia-settings
"sudo dpkg -i *.deb"… Simple like that.
I usually keep those 4 packages in case I get to have an X display problem when I experiment installing unstable things, so I can manually reinstall driver without having internet connection.
Now I use Kubuntu 18.04 alpha and I had nvidia proprietary driver installed from PPA working properly until yesterday (2018-03-02):
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Yesterday (2018-03-02) with some updates, OpenGL had been broken. So I uninstalled nvidia driver from PPA to try install nvidia from official repositories. The surprise was that it tried to install a bunch of packages that I had never seen before in other versions of Ubuntu:
http://pasteall.org/854414
So, what has changed in nvidia proprietary packaging driver starting from 390 in Ubuntu 18.04? Could someone explain it? Is there any documentation about the changes? Why libnvidia-compute? Why xserver-xorg-video-nvidia? Why so many i386 packages? Documentation of the decision on packaging changes please.
With so many packages, apparently it will not be so easy to trubelshoting nvidia graphics problems when trying to solve it by installing packages manually, for example.
Best Answer
Don't use a ppa and don't install manually. Just enable the "restricted" and "universe" repositories and then install the drivers using apt:
Replace "xxx" with the actual driver version.
For a list of available drivers, run the following command: