linux-mint drivers nvidia proprietary-drivers – How to Install Latest Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint

driverslinux-mintnvidiaproprietary-drivers

I have a Linux Mint 19.3 (Tricia) Cinnamon which is Ubuntu 18.04 based / Linux Mint 20.0 (Ulyana) Cinnamon, which is Ubuntu 20.04 based.

GPU: NVIDIA, GeForce GTX 1060, Max-Q Design, 6 GB GDDR5/X VRAM

which has the basic specification as follows:

GeForce GTX 1060 specs

Objective

To install the latest available drivers without using any PPA (Personal Package Archive).

Status

If I run the integrated Mint's Driver Manager, I only see an old version 390 available below.

nvidia-driver-390

Best Answer

Generic way

If you'd like to have the recommended packages installed too, then you could run this (the version was last updated on 2020-Dec-22):

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends nvidia-driver-455

I think I will not update the version anymore, so I will tell you instead, how to find out (manually) that there is a new version.

As there are many ways, the most comfortable for me is (as a normal user or root) typing to terminal:

apt-cache policy nvidia-driver-4

and double-tapping the Tab, an example output follows:

nvidia-driver-418         nvidia-driver-435         nvidia-driver-450
nvidia-driver-418-server  nvidia-driver-440         nvidia-driver-450-server
nvidia-driver-430         nvidia-driver-440-server  nvidia-driver-455

The resulting status in Linux Mint specifically should be afterward:

Linux Mint 20.0 - Driver Manager

nvidia-driver-455 in Driver Manager in Linux Mint 20

Ubuntu way

Thanks to the Ubuntu base, one can also take advantage of, which takes care of everything, but I do not recommend it due to one has no control over what happens, and things can break as a side effect, so the following I note only for completeness:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

To only list drivers applicable to your system, you can do:

sudo ubuntu-drivers list

which I did not know there is, even (I came across it here).

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