Hi everyone,
Until a couple of days ago, Zorin had been an amazing experience for both work and gaming. However, after running a system update from the terminal, which apparently updated either the NVIDIA drivers or the kernel (or both) I started experiencing serious issues.
Whenever I try to play any game, performance drops dramatically and after a short while the screen freezes completely, although the audio keeps playing in the background. I have to manually close the game every time.
I have an NVIDIA GTX 1650 Ti and was previously using the 550 driver, which worked perfectly, smooth performance, no freezes, no issues. But after the update, Zorin forces the 580 driver no matter what I do.
At first, I tried switching drivers from the GUI (“Additional Drivers”), but it said that certain components depended on the 580 and couldn’t be changed. The same thing happened when trying from the terminal.
So I went through a full cleanup process: I removed all NVIDIA packages, including the kernel modules related to NVIDIA, since some dependencies seemed broken after the update. After reinstalling everything, those dependency errors disappeared but even though I can now “install” other drivers, Zorin still ends up using or downloading the 580 packages.
When I try switching via the GUI, it goes through the motions but then pops up a blank error window, and if I reboot, it’s as if no driver was installed. When I try from the terminal, even if I explicitly specify the version I want (like 550), it always ends up installing or activating the 580 version.
I’ve already checked available versions with:
apt list -a nvidia-driver-*
and 550, 575, 580, etc. all appear. But no matter what, the system defaults back to 580.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated, this has made gaming nearly impossible since the update, and i'm out of ideas since i tried everything from my perpective.
Here’s my system info for reference (from neofetch):
Thanks in advance!