How to Manually Update NVIDIA Drivers on Kubuntu 24
This is a small note for myself or anyone else who finds they need to update their Kubuntu 24.04 system's NVIDIA driver manually instead of using the one provided in "ubuntu-drivers" or "apt".
First, go find the Nvidia Driver that you want to install. The download will be a "DRIVER_VERSION".run file.
Next, make the .run file executable so that we can run the file.
$ chmod +x /home/$USER/path/to/"DRIVER_VERSION".run
Now stop the display manager so we can cleanly install the driver. To do this use one of the TTY terminals by pressing "CTRL + ALT + F2 thru F6". In the TTY Terminal, log in and run:
$ sudo systemctl stop sddm.service
Once the display manager is stopped, run the driver installer.
NOTE: The installation has many options or variables, so I am not going to go into details and leave that up to each install.
$ sudo /home/$USER/path/to/"DRIVER_VERSION".run
Follow the on screen prompt to install the driver with the desired options. Once the installer has finished, restart the machine:
$ reboot
When the machine boots back up, run the following command to see if the driver version you wanted is being shown:
$ nvidia-smi
The last step that I prefer is disabling the apt package version of the driver so that updating my system does not break the driver version I have installed. To do this you tell apt to mark the package and modules as manual:
NOTE: The command below is using the nvidia-driver-570-open package and modules to be set to manual
$ sudo apt-mark manual nvidia-driver-570-open
$ sudo apt-mark manual linux-modules-nvidia-driver-570-open-generic
I also like to set the nvidia-prime tool to manual as I had issues with this breaking things in the past.
$ sudo apt-mark manual nvidia-prime
NOTE: As always, I take no responsibility of any changes you make to your system and I point you to the disclaimer link to the top of this page!!!