I'm scared of Nvidia, kernels, modules, xserver, signatures, dkms, etc. Help me overcome my terror.

[TinyTim]

Is it safe to allow 470.223.02 to 470.239.06 nvidia =ubuntu 22.04 to upgrade? Nvidia casually claims "This package is just an umbrella for a group of other packages, it has no description." I have a difficult time discerning between the nvidia driver and the kernel. I have had 3 systems crash with nvidia and kernel issues, 1 on Kubuntu, 1 on Ubuntu and 1 on Manjaro (I think that was Plymouth). As I have not been able to understand the who's and what's of it all, it has me very gun shy, and Ima both barrels kind of guy. I think this update has nothing to do with the kernel, only nvidia, but I am not for sure.

Is it a good idea to postpone these updates for weeks, months, to wait in hopes that nvidia, kernel updates shim proper, or is that a you can never know thing? (is the only solution... I've got two nvidia gpu s for sale?)
PS: desnaping Kubuntu is a good thing

[Schwarzer Kater]

You will probably not want to hear this, but if you are not dependent on Nvidia due to e.g. CUDA the best solution is to avoid their GPUs when using Linux and to prefer AMD and Intel instead.

As long as you do use Nvidia GPUs install the proprietary drivers from your distribution's repositories only and be prepared to boot with a previous kernel after a kernel update.
It can also be very convenient to use LVM/ext4 with snapshots or btrfs with snapshots as your file system to be able to quickly revert to a previous state (so you won't have to fear installing a new Nvidia driver version…).

And if something goes really terribly wrong: you do have made regular backups of all your important stuff to other storage media, of course…

[TinyTim]

Thank you, that helps. I have used previous kernels to recover from, there was 2 different times I could not boot up on the older kernel, not even recovery mode. I do depend on the nvidia for now, but I will never buy one again.