Non pressing question and something I would just like to learn about with regards to NVIDIA compatibility with Ubuntu. I have a fully working laptop at the moment but I do know without learning, that an update to a new version will be painful.
I have a Dell Precision M4800 with a 4k display as well as a Quadro K2100M, running on 22.04 LTS. To say this laptop and video card has been wonderfully compatible with Linux would be an absolute lie, it's been a painfully frustrating experience to say the least. Trying to install and have a fully working system has been quite an endeavor but after some distro hopping, I came back to Ubuntu and an LTS release where I started years ago.
I understand that better performance comes with the OEM driver compared to Nouveau. So in additional drivers I have choices.
Restricted driver options for the Quadro K2100M
I have in the past chosen the nvidia-driver-390 and restarted, upon logging back in everything was scaled at 200% but the display brightness doesn't work in any way and I can't change the brightness.
Then I tried the nvidia-driver-418-server and restarted again, everything worked as well as the brightness controls. I have stuck with this one as I can't find any problems.
My questions are, firstly, what's the difference? One has server on the description which confuses me. What else is different?
Another is where are these located? I made the mistake of trying to upgrade to 22.10 and after the upgrade, the 418-server version was missing and it was Nouveau and the 390 version as options.
I won't go into the fact that fractional scaling only works with Nouveau, asking the NVIDIA drivers to scale in fractional increments does all sorts of silly things but I will look into other threads for that.
