Sunday, July 31, 2016

14.04 - Installing Nvidia Drivers: open source vs proprietary

I have a fresh installation of Ubuntu 14.04.2, and now I want to start using Nvidia's official drivers, rather than the Nouveau drivers that come as default with Ubuntu. So, on the Nvidia website, I found which driver is needed for my graphics card, which is version 346. I ran sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa to update the repository, and then sudo apt-get install nvidia-346 to install the Nvidia driver.


Now, if I open Ubuntu Software Centre and go to Additional Drivers, it lists six drivers: five Nvidia drivers, and one Nouveau driver (which is currently selected). The Nvidia drivers are nvidia-331, nvidia-331-updates, nvidia-340, nvidia-346, and nvidia-349.


I have two questions:


1) Seeing as I only told Ubuntu to install nvidia-346, why has it also installed all of these other Nvidia drivers (331, 340 and 349)?


2) All the Nvidia drivers, except for nvidia-331-updates, are described as "open source". However, nvidia-331-updates is described as "proprietary". Why are these drivers open source, when I thought that all official Nvidia drivers would be proprietary, and only Nouveau would be open source?


Thank you!

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