Hold your NVIDIA drivers if they are stable

[ericmarceau]

How long with those be there? Launchpad seems to be currently in the phase-out stage, if I am not mistaken.

[stephematician]

Ah that's very helpful. Will have to give these a go when I have a chance.

[stephematician]

Took me a moment to find the i386 build, too. I was also interested to see how to find these drivers more generally (i.e. older, superseded drivers).

The trick is to start at Nvidia Graphics Drivers (stable) : “Canonical Kernel Team” team, then:

• Open the "View Package Details" link.
• Search for "550" but filter by Superseded instead of Published (and can select Noble instead of Any series).
• Find the package in the list and hit the ▼
• Look for Builds - and that'll take you to the page for each architecture.

Hoping to install these drivers tomorrow, so should be able to confirm if the 550.163.1 series is still good on 24.04 with the RTX 2060.

[stephematician]

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).

[stephematician]

One last thing ... I went down a long rabbit hole trying to understand why APT (but not apt-get) kept trying to install modules:

• linux-objects-nvidia-580-6.14.0-37-generic
• linux-signatures-nvidia-6.14.0-37-generic

None of these came up as dependencies of packages that I had installed. Even when I removed the ppa:graphics-drivers server and purged everything APT could know, it still wanted to install these modules even though I had the 550 DKMS installed.

No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to work other than blocking the offending package via pin, e.g. I added a file /var/lib/apt/preferences.d/99-block-nvidia-580 with:

Package: linux-objects-nvidia-*
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1

I don't know what the NVIDIA and Ubuntu maintainers have done here to create this mess (mostly NVIDIA btw) but I guess this is where we are at.

Cannot. Wait. To. Switch. To. AMD.