up vote 13 down vote favorite
8

Well obviously I can do it manually, I was just wondering why aren't these drivers available through "Additional Drivers", and why are the versions available there outdated.

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up vote 19 down vote accepted

Drivers in the Additional Tool will never be updated to higher versions unless there is a very big issue with them. You need to either add the PPA or update manually.

Upon a Ubuntu release packages are frozen in time only to be updated in case of major problems and bugs. Adding this PPA will update your drivers to the latest versions using packages packed by the Ubuntu team.

The System 76 folks maintain a PPA with just the nvidia drivers in them, so you can use this for just about any machine with an nvidia driver. The nice thing is they keep this PPA up to date with the latest upstream nvidia driver, making this PPA ideal for gamers.

If you already have the drivers installed in your system via the Additional Drivers tool

Add the System76 driver PPA (that includes Nvidia drivers)

sudo add-apt-repository -ys ppa:system76-dev/stable

Update and upgrade

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install system76-driver-nvidia

Then either restart the X server or reboot.

How to remove/uninstall these drivers

Install ppa-purge

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

Purge the system76 team PPA

sudo ppa-purge ppa:system76-dev/stable
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As of today, ppa:system76-dev/stable provides the nvidia 361.42, while the current version is 384. Thus this answer is not the solution any more, because this ppa seems outdated. – Max N Aug 9 '17 at 14:06
up vote 3 down vote

Since it's an old (2015) question the previous answers are be a bit outdated. The system76-dev/stable ppa does not seem up to date. Proprietary nvidia drivers are removed from bleeding edge xorg-edgers ppa but can be found now in the graphics-drivers paa.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

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up vote 0 down vote

The xorg-edgers PPA also works well. From what I understand, this is a PPA that posts the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers. To install, open a terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Now you should have drivers listed in the Additional Drivers tool.

The only thing I don't get is, when you go to Additional Drivers, why are the proprietary drivers listed as open source? enter image description here

To Uninstall
Install ppa-purge:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

Purge the Edgers' PPA:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
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up vote -1 down vote

Try looking for a PPA. Basically anything in the repos is tested and generally all works the latest versions take time to come through. Some NVIDIA drivers are also classed as experimental so wouldn't be suitable for a novice end user who might stumble across them in additional drivers to install. So a good way of getting the latest and greatest is by seeing if someone has made a PPA by googling. If not you're back to manual sorry!

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well yes, sounds fair enough. What if I use the ones available from the "Additional Drivers"? Will the performance be notably worse? – Shahe Tajiryan Feb 15 '12 at 20:18
    
not generally unless new features have been added check the NVIDIA website for that info. In some cases especially if they've been tested by the Ubuntu developers performance may actually be improved over untested ones – Andy Feb 15 '12 at 20:20
    
And 1 last thing, there are 2 drivers available. The first is "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version current) [recommended]" and the second is "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post-release updates) (version current-updates)". Which one should I use? – Shahe Tajiryan Feb 15 '12 at 20:21
    
I don't think it really matters if you're going for stability i'd go for the recommended one. Check out the descriptions of each they will tell you the difference, if they don't then install either I wouldn't think it matters too much as they're both from the Ubuntu repos – Andy Feb 15 '12 at 20:28
    
I'll follow the other answer, though thanks for clarification :) – Shahe Tajiryan Feb 15 '12 at 20:36

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