I will start with a disclaimer: I have been using Xubuntu for a few years now, but I would still consider myself a beginner.
When I first installed(12.04) my computer detected that there were additional drivers available for my Nvidia card (a geforce 540 at the time).
When the proprietary drivers came out (304?) I had to install them manually every time because the install from additional drivers would fail (sudo sh NVIDIA-...)
Something happened about 6 months ago, and they began showing up on my updates and being convenient. I assume that means I had added a repository, but I have no idea which one.
I recently upgraded to a Geforce 750Ti, and at the same time tried to upgrade to 14.04 (from 12.10)
The update went bad, and I had to reinstall. The newer installation cd wouldn't even load without the nomodeset option.
I no longer have my proprietary drivers, and am currently stuck with a 800x600 resolution.
I tried installing nvidia-current with the package manager. It says that it installs them, but then it doesn't seem to use them.
I have also tried installing the binary drivers directly. (This gave me a lot of errors and did not work).
I know that at one point steam was notifying me of the drivers and offering to enable them in the past. I tried installing steam to see if that could be a method, but steam failed to launch with an error about not having OpenGL.
I don't get why it isn't giving me the option to install from "additional drivers" if I can get nvidia-current via apt-get.
I have probably spent about 10 hours at this point looking, but haven't found a solution that worked for my situation.
Please forgive me if this is an extremely stupid question, and thanks in advance for any help you can give.