I wrote an email to System76 support describing the latest issue (I took out the person’s actual name)

Good morning agent12,

I believe I identified the issue - Nvidia drivers installed from the Pop OS store (and not with apt).

Over the weekend, I wiped my system clean and started with a fresh install of Pop OS. When I updated the nvidia drivers from the command line using the instructions you provided earlier (including the purge)1, the system installed the driver (570.153.02) without an issue. I was able to restart the system and log in. I installed a couple of programs and then it occurred to me to try the Pop OS store driver, which has a slightly more advanced version (575.57.08):

Auto-generated description: A software interface displays available updates and installations for various applications, including NVIDIA drivers and other utilities.

After the driver started installing, the screen turned off and the system froze in the same manner it did before2. I attempted to purge and install again from the terminal, but it froze again - so, I was back where I was before. I wiped my system clean again, started with a clean Pop OS, and was able to upgrade the drivers from the terminal once more. This time I’m not trying to download and install drivers from the store.

When I looked up the Nvidia drivers for linux on their site, I wasn’t able to find the version in the Pop OS store anyway, though Nvidia’s site does have more advanced drivers - and they come with the recommendation not to install those and stick to the distro’s version.

Given that the games I play on Steam seem to be happy with these drivers that come with apt, I think I will stick to those for now. Hopefully I won’t' encounter random freezes again.

Do you have an idea why the Pop OS drivers won’t work? The store is convenient, especially with the integration of flatpacks, but I don’t mind using the command line.

Footnotes

1 : The insturciton I was given are pruging nvidia drivers from the system, and then reinstalling them with system76’s repo:

sudo apt purge ~nvidia
sudo apt clean
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --reinstall system76-driver-nvidia
sudo systemctl reboot

2 : My issue was that during the driver upgrade, the screen would turn off and the system would stop responding. It’s normal to have the screen turn off for a few seconds when you install a new GPU driver (at least on Windows), but I did leave my system on overnight at one point, and it still was at the same state the next morning. The keyboard did not respond either. I had to restart, which damaged the upgrade process, which I then had to fix with sudo dpkg --configure -a from a rescue shell because I couldn’t load the Gnome environment. After the above command and a restart, the upgrade seemed to have gone through, but then there was the other issue: the desktop fan would suddenly start blasting, and the screen would turn off in the same manner I just mentioned. This would usually happen when I would play something that requires more GPU juice, like a game.