How to install the latest Nvidia drivers on Linux Mint 20

Question

I have a Linux Mint 20.0 (Ulyana) Cinnamon, which is Ubuntu 20.04 based.

---

GPU: NVIDIA, GeForce GTX 1060, Max-Q Design, 6 GB GDDR5/X VRAM

which has the basic specification as follows:

---

Objective

To install the latest available drivers without using any PPA (Personal Package Archive).

---

Status

If I run the integrated Mint's Driver Manager, I only see an old version 390 available below.

Disclaimer - please read before you install anything

Today, I ran into an old laptop, with Nvidia Geforce GT 520M, which is not supported by the latest driver anymore, version 390 works fine though. Therefore, I must strongly recommend running a search on the Nvidia drivers page before you try to install any driver version!

---

Generic way - the recommended way

---

If you'd like to have the recommended packages installed too, then you could run this (the version was last updated on 2021-Aug-04):

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends nvidia-driver-470

I may not update the version anymore, so I will tell you instead, how to find out (manually) that there is a new version.

As there are many ways, the most comfortable for me is (as a normal user or root) typing to terminal:

apt-cache policy nvidia-driver-4

and double-tapping the Tab, an example output follows:

nvidia-driver-418         nvidia-driver-440-server  nvidia-driver-460-server
nvidia-driver-418-server  nvidia-driver-450         nvidia-driver-465
nvidia-driver-430         nvidia-driver-450-server  nvidia-driver-470
nvidia-driver-435         nvidia-driver-455         nvidia-driver-470-server
nvidia-driver-440         nvidia-driver-460         

---

Linux Mint 20.2 - Driver Manager

It may be possible to even use GUI driver manager for this. Generally, I like the command-line way much more, actually, I never use this GUI, because it does not tell you what is happening, you would just blindly look at the progress bar. Therefore I strongly recommend not using this tool, and do the job via terminal as shown above.

---

---

Ubuntu way - NOT RECOMMENDED (!!!)

---

Thanks to the Ubuntu base, one can also take advantage of, which takes care of everything, but I do not recommend it due to one has no control over what happens, and things can break as a side effect, so the following I note only for completeness (click your mouse to show):

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

To only list drivers applicable to your system, you can do:

sudo ubuntu-drivers list

which will list all drivers available to install on your Ubuntu-based system.

Comments

[ajgringo619]

How did you get access to this driver version without a PPA? Are you sure that you're using v19.3?

[Vlastimil Burián]

It's worth mentioning, that when installed this way, you'd have to redo the steps after each kernel update, which can be extremely annoying to me at least. Source: This AskUbuntu answer. The whole procedure seems inconvenient at best.

[ron]

@ LinuxSecurityFreak : if you install DKMS then when nvidia installs it will state I see DKMS is installed do you want to register Nvidia with it. You say yes, and that solves that problem; yes losing the nvidia kernel module after every kernel update is annoying but DKMS is the solution to that.

[ron]

The *whole* procedure is inconvenient but that's not my fault see : youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ I'm just telling you the way I have done it which has been reliable for me and as streamlined as I have been able to make it; don't hate the messenger.