Nvidia offers a lot of confusing drivers

[codygarver]

Nvidia support multiple driver releases for different hardware, which looks overwhelming when presented by AppCenter.

It would be best to only show the relevant driver.

[codygarver]

afaik the ubuntu-drivers-common contains the logic to propose the correct driver based on the pci-id of the installed card

—@ricotz

[sudopluto]

yeah when you run ubuntu-drivers autoinstall, ubuntu drivers manages to select the relevant packages and install.

[sudopluto]

Coming back to this. I think I can give this a go. Looking at the code, it just uses ubuntu-drivers list, which auto sorts the available drivers per device. I will try to learn some vala, but I propose one of two options:

1. add the first driver in ubuntu-drivers list that has a new stub (stub = intel, nvidia, amd)

2. use ubuntu-drivers devices, and use == to identify a new device, and when one is found, select the first driver in the driver list

[sudopluto]

pranav@pranav-notebook:~$ ubuntu-drivers devices == /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:02:00.0 == modalias : pci:v000010DEd0000139Bsv00001028sd00000706bc03sc02i00 vendor : NVIDIA Corporation model : GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] driver : nvidia-390 - third-party free recommended driver : nvidia-384 - distro non-free driver : nvidia-387 - third-party free driver : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

== cpu-microcode.py == driver : intel-microcode - distro free

[waldyrious]

Would it be feasible to also add a small note in the grey text under the driver name (or perhaps under the "Drivers" header would be more appropriate) saying why one might want to install the driver?

For a non-tech-savvy user whose computer is working without issues, it might be unclear why these drivers are being recommended.

[Garbee]

Filtering it down to just one option isn't a good idea. Access to all of them is necessary. I've hit a few bugs on newer drivers which required me to rollback to older ones to get the OS stable again.

Perhaps this type of UX could be done to help the situation:

1. Reverse ordering so they flow newest to oldest.
2. Have some text displayed for the recommended version.
3. Only show the latest/recommended by default. Hide the rest under a collapse menu titled "Alternative NVIDIA Drivers" or something to that effect.
4. Inside of the collapse panel, at the top we could have a little info warning to only use older/non-recommended drivers if you're experiencing issues with the latest version.

This highlights and prioritizes the recommended/latest driver, helps the "mess" the others cause, yet still allows for users to get to them in case they experience issues.

[danirabbit]

Gonna punt this feature since we're already end of April

[danirabbit]

Transferring to System Settings since Drivers are moving out of AppCenter