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OK, so I haven't find any answer, only one that claims the "nvidia-updates" is newer versions, yet the driver instalator says this:

4 options:

nvidia 331.113, nvidia-updates 331.113, legacy nvidia 304.125, legacy nvidia-updates 304.125

Which one to install? What's the difference between nvidia and nvidia-updates? Since both report as the same version.

Which should I choose? Legacy or non-legacy? Both 331.113 and legacy 304.125 were released at the same day, bot are supported by my card.. Which is GT520M

https://www.nvidia.co.uk/download/driverResults.aspx/80563/en-uk AND http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/80133/en-us

They have some common changelogs.. so I'm confused. And new non-legacy drivers are still being developed for this GPU.

And last question. Why the driver is so outdated? It's from 2014.

Justauser
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    It mostly depends on the card model, but since "this GPU" is all we know about yours, here are some general points. Nvidia-updates should be updated sooner, with less testing, as opposed to nvidia. 331.113 is for newer cards, 304.125 is for older (legacy) ones. Chances are, either of them will work well for "this GPU". ...similar question – mikewhatever Jul 29 '15 at 21:16
  • Oh sorry, I edited my post and forgot to re-write the card model. It's GT520M (laptop).

    Both these drivers are supported for this card.

    Anyway, by your answer, I understand that NON-nvidia-updates gets all the updates like nvidia-updates, but later, right?

    I was thinking... the legacy driver just probably adds support for my GPU on newer kernel and xorg. but the non-legacy still adds features and improvements. But I may be wrong.

     – Justauser Jul 29 '15 at 21:25

1 Answers1

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I marked this as a duplicate of What's the difference between the nvidia-current, and nvidia-current-updates packages?

However, to answer your last question:

"Why the driver is so outdated? It's from 2014"

If you go here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html you will see that version 340 is a legacy version. Legacy versions are long-lived, and don't get feature updates but only bug-fixes. The current long-lived branch is base version 352, and short-lived is 355. Base version 331 is a short-lived branch that has expired so it isn't updated any more (not even bug-fixes like the legacy 340 does). The only drivers for Linux that are still updated are the ones shown on the link above (legacy and current long & short lived branches).

Community
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pd12
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  • I've already found an answer weeks ago.

    I don't think the answer provided is precise.

    The non-update and update versions are both updated automatically through update manager.

    The difference is in the package version, updates provided by Ubuntu.

    For example "nvidia-346" is now "346.96-0ubuntu0.0.1" ------------------- " nvidia-346-updates" could be a "346.96-0ubuntu0.0.3"

    But right now, they are both on version "ubuntu0.0.1", so no difference.

    From my experience, I have installed non-update version, and when security patch came out by NVIDIA, it was updated.

     – Justauser Nov 05 '15 at 09:30
  • And when I had a non-updates NVIDIA driver version like 32x (or something like that), it was updated through update manager to version 346. It installed these new drivers.

    Or maybe there's more to it, and the updates version updates the drivers differently.

     – Justauser Nov 05 '15 at 09:33