14 DAY TRIAL // A new set of NVIDIA Linux drivers has been released and this time they are for the long-lived branch, which makes them perfect candidates to be added in the official repositories.
NVIDIA has been rather busy these past few weeks and the company has released a number of drivers, either Beta or from the short-lived branch. In any case, Linux users who feature this kind of hardware will be happy to find that this latest version will most likely land pretty soon in the repositories, making them available to a much wider audience.
As you all well know, NVIDIA drivers are not exactly easy to install and many of the Linux users only upgrade when the new packages are made available in the repositories. It's not unusual, but most of the time that also means that there is a rather long wait for some of the newer features. That doesn't imply that you can't get the drivers installed right away, just that it's a lot easier to wait and safer for your operating system.
NVIDIA 340.65 Linux drivers are considered stable
NVIDIA maintains several concurrent branches and they are usually addressed to different kinds of users. Most of the new and interesting stuff usually lands in the latest Beta version, which is not stable. Still, if you want support for new type of video card or you want better performance from the latest game, you might consider getting this one.
Then, there is the short-lived branch, which is just a small stop for some of the features before they are pushed into the more stable one, the long-lived branch. If you don't have something like Arch Linux, which integrates in its repositories most of the available drivers, it's very likely that you actually have access to only the most stable version.
One of the reasons for the release of NVIDIA 340.65 Linux driver is the support that was just added for X.Org xserver ABI 19 (xorg-server 1.17). Also, all the newer Linux kernels are now supported, all 4K displays are now used properly (especially for laptops), a couple of regressions have been corrected, and an annoying bug that was causing X to freeze in certain conditions has been fixed.
Users can download NVIDIA 340.65 Linux drivers from Softpedia, for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architecture and give them a try. We also have a tutorial on how to install the driver in Ubuntu, if you don't want to wait around for the repositories.
