According to ubuntu-drivers devices the recommended driver for my system is open 595 driver, but ubuntu-drivers install installs the 580… Anyone else experienced this or anyone who can explain what is happening and why?
I have already tried purging everything nvidia related, but the command always installs the 580 open driver.
Btw I am not complaining here. I actually think 580 is a good/best default choice for most systems except maybe some/all 50* series cards. However, there’s a discrepancy here between what ubuntu-drivers devices claims is recommended and what the “install“ command does. From my understanding it is supposed to install the “recommended“ driver (Maybe that’s wrong?).
I just read this bug report about a similar situation. I’m not sure if it’s related, but this seems to suggest that the 580 open driver is a LTS driver and, therefore, “more” recommended. If that’s the case, then what you’ve run into is less a bug and more an unintuitive feature.
Either way, I’d recommend filing a bug report via ubuntu-bug ubuntu-drivers-common and explain the situation there.
Thanks. I may do that, but first I want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding something.
One question I still have is: should ubuntu-drivers install install the driver listed as recommended by ubuntu-drivers devices, or is that not necessarily the case?
For me, the 595 driver appeared in the DKMS options, and to use it, I needed to use the --include-dkms switch and sign it with MOK. Version 580 is currently stable, so if you don’t want to test the new one, you might want to wait until an update is released that includes the new driver.
The theory is that it’s going to automatically install whichever is better for your machine, not necessarily what it has listed there.
I’d still file a bug report in case you haven’t already, but I’m not sure how it determines recommended vs how it installs. (I don’t develop the tool).
Yeah, because they currently don’t ship compiled and signed modules for 595. So far, I’ve only seen this with drivers from proposed repo, but in this case the driver is not from proposed.
It appears the recommended driver wasn’t installed because the kernel module package was missing. Once linux-modules-nvidia-595-open-generic-hwe-26.04 package became available, ubuntu-drivers install began installing the recommended 595 open driver
The short answer to your question is Software & Updates is not needed.
The slightly longer answer is: During installation the user decides if he/she wants a proprietary or open source video driver. There is no need for the user to access Software & Updates to activate a proprietary video driver.
The same line of thinking could be used to replace GNOME with just a window manager and justify a lot of other questionable decisions. And no, I’m not saying it makes zero sense, but it’s definitely not the whole argument.
“Additional Drivers” made it easy to switch between different driver versions. While Nvidia has made some good progress lately, the situation is far from ideal (it’s pretty bad from a regular user’s PoV.) Recent driver versions (590 and 595 for sure) introduced serious regressions that break some popular games. Right now, 580 is actually the most stable option for the majority of people, especially on pre-Blackwell GPUs, which is overwhelming majority of the GPUs.
With “Additional Drivers”, you could just open the GUI, pick 580, wait a bit, reboot. Sure, one can do all of that in a terminal as well, but Canonical keeps talking about the “average” user and making things “less complicated”. The average user wants to be able to play games. Some games only work with 595, some only with 590, and most work with 580, yet Canonical (or whoever is in charge here) hasn’t made 580 the recommended driver.