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I've just installed Steam for Linux on my machine and I am given a error message telling me that my NVIDIA drivers are outdated. They tell me that I need the 304.?? drivers to continue. These are shown when I open "External Drivers", but they are shown as Experimental BETA.

Is it safe to activate them anyway. I mean; I don't want my computer to stop working and I have to reinstall Ubuntu.

If there is any other way I could get my Steam client to work I would really like to know that to.

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  • my lubuntu 12.04 (32bit) is working fine with the 295.40 nvidia driver. but the latest versions broke the display into 6 segments, and made unusable/unbootable the system. so, i reverted to 295.40. my GPU is a Geforce G105M. (same happened with 64 bit ubuntus) thanks valve... the steam client is unusable for me.
    – user138211
    Mar 6, 2013 at 22:50
  • Just to clarify - the message is not an error (as in something failed to start/work properly) but just a prompt for the user telling him/her that some issues might be resolved by updating the video drivers. As the name also states "experimental" is experimental thus it is not supposed to be used if you are not willing to take the risk. That and the fact that the Steam client is quite unpolished and buggy and so are some of the games for Linux (including DoTA 2). I haven't had any major problems using the non-experimental drivers. If something doesn't work or is missing a feature, than update. Mar 21, 2014 at 13:55

3 Answers 3

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Please understand that Steam is under beta at the moment and requires features not present on the drivers supplied on the official repositories from Ubuntu.

Use at your best discretion and learn how to revert to previous drivers before upgrading them.

They should be considered stable-ish, in the end its up to you.

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These Experimental Nvidia Drivers contains several fixes, specially tailored for Steam.

I have a friend who was part in the Steam Linux Beta, and has used those Beta Drivers for a while with no problems.

I think it's safe to install those.

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  • I can confirm they work well (IMO better than the non-experimental ones) and have been using them for several months with no issues.
    – Neojames
    Dec 20, 2012 at 12:00
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It is absolutely not safe unless you know how to roll back your video drivers to the stable version from the command line because that is what you're going to be doing.

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