Had troubles with nvidia in 13.10 too, so i went back to 13.04 for now. I'll stick with that for some months.

@ Bregma. Usually the installer from Nvidia works better than from the repos after installing the kernel source. Personal experience to update drivers.

@ Bregma. Usually the installer from Nvidia works better than from the archives after installing the kernel source. Personal experience to update drivers.

No. The downloaded nVidia installer copies over the various OpenGL libraries and some other system libraries instead of linking them through the alternatives system as a good package would do. It also clobbers some of your system configuration files. It's fine if you never want to remove the package or even upgrade properly, or if your preferred method of upgrading is to wipe the disk and reinstall, but if you're used to smooth problem-free upgrades, or if there are bugs in the nVidia driver (and there often are in releases that have not been tested by the Ubuntu package maintainers), you're in for a bad time. If you use your system for work and need to rely on it, stick to the Ubuntu packages.

I have never had a problem installing and uninstalling the nVidia packages from the Ubuntu archives. I have had a great deal of trouble using the drivers downloaded from the nVidia site. Fortunately I have personal connections with the people who maintain these things, or I would have had difficult getting my system back to a working state. Personal experience updating the drivers.

Thanks a lot Bregma for that information. I am still not sure if I want to install the latest "prime" after reading some of the issues with Optimus in Linux. Have you by chanced used them in 13.10 to where you could comment on it. I do think they would be fine for me just not sure if I want to take the chance of my laptop getting hot and always having to check that out. So if you have any opinions on that then that would be greatly appreciated.

I don't have Optimus on any of my machines, so I can't really comment from experience. One of the guys on my team does, I can ask him about his experience.

As I understand it, you want to install the nvidia-319 package instead of the default nvidia-current package to get proper power management for the Optimus. The nvidia-current is version 304, which is stable and has undergone more widespread user testing. If you use 319, you may need to be prepared to file bugs but there is already intense testing of that version going on by a (nameless) third party who is known to stretch GPUs to their limit, so it's probably OK.

No. The downloaded nVidia installer copies over the various OpenGL libraries and some other system libraries instead of linking them through the alternatives system as a good package would do. It also clobbers some of your system configuration files. It's fine if you never want to remove the package or even upgrade properly, or if your preferred method of upgrading is to wipe the disk and reinstall, but if you're used to smooth problem-free upgrades, or if there are bugs in the nVidia driver (and there often are in releases that have not been tested by the Ubuntu package maintainers), you're in for a bad time. If you use your system for work and need to rely on it, stick to the Ubuntu packages.

In my personal experience I've never had any problems updating from the nvidia site, which I do every couple of months. But on the other side, I've even ended up once with a unbootable system only by installing from ppa.

In 13.10, using default repos, I've ended up with a huge boot delay of around one minute! That's why I needed to go back to 13.04...sigh a huge mess that should be fixed.

Thanks a lot Bregma for that information. I am still not sure if I want to install the latest "prime" after reading some of the issues with Optimus in Linux. Have you by chanced used them in 13.10 to where you could comment on it. I do think they would be fine for me just not sure if I want to take the chance of my laptop getting hot and always having to check that out. So if you have any opinions on that then that would be greatly appreciated.

I don't have Optimus on any of my machines, so I can't really comment from experience. One of the guys on my team does, I can ask him about his experience.

As I understand it, you want to install the nvidia-319 package instead of the default nvidia-current package to get proper power management for the Optimus. The nvidia-current is version 304, which is stable and has undergone more widespread user testing. If you use 319, you may need to be prepared to file bugs but there is already intense testing of that version going on by a (nameless) third party who is known to stretch GPUs to their limit, so it's probably OK.

I appreciate your knowledge and everyone else's knowledge of Ubuntu/Linux Distributions. I am right now trying to migrate over slowly and attempt to start using Ubuntu as my every day Operating System. I may go ahead and attempt those latest nVidia Drivers tonight and see how they work out.

Though as of right now I am loving Ubuntu. What I always seem to love to see is the amount of resources/memory that is being used even when I have a number of Apps running. It's enjoyable not to see so many applications/services that seem to be resource hogs. Everything seems to be very efficient. While I never had an issue with speed or memory issues in Windows 8 Pro, it seems like a resource hog compared to what I see now with the equivalent programs up.

Wanted to ask a quick question to make sure I am on the right track. Would installing the drivers like described on the BumbleBee page be correct for me?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee

If from what I am understanding properly, on 13.10, I would just need to run these two commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee virtualgl linux-headers-generic

It seems from what I'm reading that should install the drivers that I would need and allow me to just use optirun if I wanted to run the application with the discrete graphics card. Am I reading that correctly?