How to install the latest Nvidia drivers on Linux Mint 20

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Method 1

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.

Method 2

With NVIDIA being a 3rd party / proprietary driver, they are never included in any linux distribution whether it is MINT, or RHEL, or SLES, or UBUNTU.

If you go to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers navigate to your model graphics card and for Operating System you will see the only relevant one being Linux 64-bit and in doing so will download a NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.57.02.run file for example. I don’t believe Nvidia distinguishes between any modern 64-bit linux, except for “solaris” and “freebsd”. So it is this same .run file for rhel or sles or ubuntu or mint or whatever is a popular distro these days.

Having that file present on your system, change to runlevel 3 either by doing init 3 or if you are systemd based then systemcyl isolate multi-user.target. Then as root do a chmod 700 NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.57.02.run followed by a ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.57.02.run and simply step through the semi-graphical install which usually at the end prompts you if you want to run nvidia-xconfig {which will create an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file on a RHEL-7 system that previously was not present.}

This method I have used for ~5 years now reliably, the main points being

I have gotten the driver directly from the source, which is Nvidia
I have gotten the latest version
It works; at least in RHEL/CentOS 7 which is what I use now but it has worked for me back when I was using SLES/SuSE 11 and it should work for other distro’s such as Mint or Ubuntu and so on.
- if it doesn’t work I would be interested in knowing so let me know in a comment.
- know that you have to disable nouveau at least in RHEL/CentOS 7 and that is done by modifying /etc/default/grub and appending a modprobe.blacklist=nouveau to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and then doing a grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.cfg and a systemctl set-default multi-user.target followed by a reboot then installing the nvidia .run file and systemctl set-default graphical.target. Modify syntax here appropriately for linux distros other than rhel.

Method 3

This works for me.

First I remove all the Nvidia drivers:

$ sudo dpkg --purge $(dpkg -l | grep nvidia | awk '{print $2}')
$ sudo dpkg --purge $(dpkg -l | grep libnvidia | awk '{print $2}')

After that, I install the latest version:

$ sudo apt-get install --install-recommends nvidia-driver-455

Note: Done on Linux Mint 19.3

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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