How to use old NVIDIA Cards in Kubuntu 22.04

What’s up guys this is Harshith, and in this article, I’m going to show you how you can use old NVIDIA graphics cards in Kubuntu 22.04.

I recently switched to a much older PC with great specs and an NVIDIA Quadro K2000M.

I wanted to use the graphics card to the max, so I Googled and this were the best solutions I found.

Using The Terminal

Firstly, You need to check if the GPU is recognized.

ubuntu-drivers devices

For reference, this is what I got:

Here the output shows that nvidia-driver-390 is my recommended driver, and the last numbers will vary depending on the model.

Now to install the driver execute the following

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-390

Recommended here simply means that these drivers are tested in an environment or machine similar to yours. For us, this was tested in an old release of Ubuntu when these cards were still in use.

This method however didn’t exactly work for me. I have mentioned it here as this was one of the methods that I found. Even if it might work for you I wouldn’t recommend this for beginners as the change of drivers if not correct is irreversible.

Using The GUI (Recommended)

According to the latest stable release of Kubuntu in 2022 you can switch or install additional drivers using the system settings app

Under Hardware choose Driver Manager. You will be prompted to enter your password for security reasons.

I have an old NVIDIA Quadro K2000M and this just simply lets me switch between Drivers. The first two drivers are from NVIDIA and proprietary and the third one is the default driver for X11

ISSUES

Although I am able to use my NVIDIA GPU I do face some minor problems like over-scaling of the system UI and issues when waking from sleep.

Do let me know if you guys know of some fixes or workarounds for these issues!

Extras

ZSH theme: Starship
OS: Arch Linux
Specs:
1. i7 3rd gen
2. 32 GB RAM
3. NVIDIA Quadro K2000M
Type: Laptop