[RESOLVED] Only the horrible nouveau driver installed and proprietary installs fail???!!!

[DarcSceptor]

I have been experiencing some major issues with 25.04 and my NVidia card. In my browser I get as much as 1 minute stalls at random times.
I ran lshw on the video card and it reports: configuration: depth=32 driver=nouveau latency=0 mode=1920x1080 resolution=1920,1080 visual=truecolor xres=1920 yres=1080

Any time I have used that driver I get horrid results. I added the PPA for NVidia drivers and tried installing the proprietary drivers but after I thought it worked the nvidia-smi(?) failed.
I need help getting the propietary drivers installed so I can move on to testing my games here. On other distro's running KDE Plasma Wayland they automatically installed the most current driver from NVidia! HELP -- I experienced three lockups just typing in this message.
I

[claydoh]

Please provide more details so others can better assist:

Which video card?

Other basic hardware specs?

Did you ever try using stock, non-PPA versions of the proprietary driver, using the Driver Manager? A PPA is not absolutely necessary, though the Driver Manager will offer multiple driver versions to choose from, as well as automatically choosing one, even with the added source.

What is the exact, full error message involving SMI?

On other distro's running KDE Plasma Wayland they automatically installed the most current driver from NVidia!

Which ones do that, and which speficic version of the driver worked for you?

[DarcSceptor]

So I was going through writing up what I did, my system
MINISFORUM 795S7 Mini Tower Gaming PC AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX(16C/32T) Computer
32GB DDR5, 1TB PCIe4.0 Nvme,2TB PCIe4.0 Nvme,
2.5G LAN, HDMI+DP+USB-C Outputs with NVidia RTX 4060 Graphics

I pulled up a directions page that was different from what I googled earlier!

Long story short, following those steps I actually installed the NVidia 575 driver without problems and the nvidia-smi worked after reboot!
Sun Jul 6 08:15:01 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 575.64.03 Driver Version: 575.64.03 CUDA Version: 12.9 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======= =================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| 43% 50C P8 N/A / 115W | 583MiB / 8188MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |


To answer the questions which distro install it during setup:
CachyOS and Bazzite

An interesting note on this install is that it did not installed the NVidia driver manager software from all appeances. The Nvidia icon is not in my traskbar preventing me from setting the driver mode.
So do you know how I can get that utility installed?

Finally: With real video drivers I no longer get the long pauses in the browser. Gracias a dios.

[notabug]

Look for Driver Manager in the Settings app in the System section. My Kubuntu 25.04 install shows System/Driver Manager settings near the bottom of of the settings app.

[claydoh]

. The Nvidia icon is not in my traskbar preventing me from setting the driver mode.

The Nvidia Settings app would not be in your task manager or system tray normally (though I am not sure about that to be honest) But it should be in your app menus.

[DarcSceptor]

The Nvidia Settings app would not be in your task manager or system tray normally (though I am not sure about that to be honest) But it should be in your app menus.

It may not be in the system tray for Kubuntu and that is fine. In Mint it is in the system tray. But at least I know where to go to use it. After a long search for the "perfect" distro I have finally found it in Kubuntu!