Hold your NVIDIA drivers if they are stable

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Giving credit to @Dreamjammer for finding the built packages for Noble.

To add some final instructions;

  • If you've held the NVIDIA drivers at 550.144.03 because they were still available via the PPA, then you can unhold (sudo apt-mark unhold) and remove those drivers.
  • Download all the .deb files including the i386 builds if you need them (e.g. for some wine applications), see Dreamjammer's post and my follow up for locations.
  • Discard one either the non-open or the open DKMS:
    • nvidia-dkms-550_550.163.01-0ubuntu0.24.04.1_amd64.deb, or
    • nvidia-dkms-550-open_550.163.01-0ubuntu0.24.04.1_amd64.deb.
  • Run sudo dpkg -i and list all the debian files or use *.deb if you are happy with all the packages.
  • Hold the packages again, e.g. sudo apt-mark hold nvidia-driver-550 nvidia-kernel-common-550 libnvidia-kernel-common-550 should do the trick.
  • If you were using 550.144.03, you would not be on the latest HWE kernel, you can now switch back to using HWE if you like (e.g. sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe) which on 24.04 will be 6.14.
    • I had a small unrelated hiccup with openrazer-driver-dkms not being present for 6.14 which I fixed via a sudo apt reinstall openrazer-driver-dkms.

These drivers will all appear as manually installed now, btw, so if you ever want to remove them you'll need to unhold and list them individually after sudo apt remove.

For some information about open vs non-open DKMS, see NVIDIA - ArchWiki - one thing worth noting for a card like mine (RTX 2060) is that the open driver cannot do full power management, so I am using the non-open driver (for battery life).

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