Some years ago, I was naughty. Ubuntu already provided NVidia proprietary driver that worked good on my computer but I manually download and install the driver from NVidia official website, which I thought it may have better performance.
I remember I followed their installation instruction properly. I was and still am a computer technician, I should able to understand the instruction. Guess what, it broke my Ubuntu twice. It even can't boot to safe mode, only OS reinstalling can help. Lesson learned, don't use drivers not provided by the OS if you use Linux.
Other than that Ubuntu is okay, I didn't need to reinstall it. If something bad happened, I can restart to safe mode and repair. Actually Ubuntu is buggy, I can mention lots of bugs I found. But it's now working good and the NVidia driver already installed correctly, which now I can run Windows 3D games using Wine correctly.
Thank you for link. Ubuntu does provide that driver. Installing NVidia drivers on Ubuntu is a piece of cake, it has a built-in tool for NVidia drivers. You just pick the one you want, if it fails to start correctly then restart to safe mode and pick the others. Currently on version 17.10, it provides these drivers for NVidia cards by the default installation:
- nvidia-384 (fails on my machine)
- nvidia-340 (fails on my machine)
- legacy binary driver 304 (it works)
- Nouveau open source driver (it works but can't play 3D games)