14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has released a new set of Linux drivers in the Long Lived branch and they have added support for some of the latest chipsets, like GTX 960 or GTX 965M.
It's been a couple weeks since the latest update for NVIDIA drivers and even longer since a version was proposed into the Long Lived branch. This is the version most likely to land in repositories and it's considered to be the most stable. To be fair, there is another stable version called Short Lived, which is updated much more often. The problem is that it's not available in repos because it's updated too often and there is no time to properly test it.
Another issue is that NVIDIA drivers are best installed from the repositories. The manual installation of the drivers is possible, but it creates a number of problems that can become really annoying. It's possible that a kernel update will force the user to manually install the NVIDIA headers all over again, and that's not a picnic.
NVIDIA 346.47 Linux drivers are stable
As you can imagine, these kinds of Long Live drivers are not the most exciting ones, but they do provide the necessary stability and features. They are not a testing ground for new features and it takes a lot of time until something from the Beta branch lands.
"Fixed a bug that caused Xinerama layouts which included X screens with 'Option "UseDisplayDevice" "none"' to be represented incorrectly in the nvidia-settings control panel. Fixed a bug that caused the X server to crash if a RandR 1.4 output provided by a Sink Output provider was selected as the primary output on X.Org xserver 1.17 and higher." These are just a couple of the problems repaired.
Also, support has been added for Quadro K620M, Quadro K2200M, GeForce GTX 960, and GeForce GTX 965M. Users can download NVIDIA 346.47 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.