NVidia Drivers on Linux

Whenever I do an upgrade, it generally goes well except for the video drivers. Updating is generally:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

sudo do-release-upgrade

and addressing any issues interactively along the way (for instance, something had changed my tlp.conf).

However, even after an otherwise successul upgrade, I was having trouble with my monitor. Firstly, the laptop screen was blank while the external was OK (the upgrade had not installed NVidia drivers); then the other way around; then the colours were odd (driver version 525).

At first, I went on a wild goose chase with missing X11 config. I think the conf file is supposed to be absent and the advice in this old askubuntu post is old. The official NVidia site itself was also not helpful.

I had to blat all NVidia drivers with [LinuxMint]:

sudo apt purge *nvidia*

sudo apt autoremove

I also updated the kernel with [askubuntu]:

sudo update-initramfs -u

and the kernel headers:

sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

then (as recommended at askubuntu):

sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:535

Version 535 seems stable and rebooting gave me a working system. YMMV.

I had tried 525 as sometimes the release before last is more stable (or so I read) but no joy. To clean them up, I needed to run:

sudo sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/nvidia-dkms-525.* ~/Temp

as not all versions seem to be stable.