For real. Literally yesterday, reboot my computer and Nvidia drivers that had worked fine the day before no longer functioned resulting in my screen resolution being reduced and unchangeable.

Had to run a few commands to fix it but they are not obvious to me as a new-ish Linux user. Something about dkms being a dependency but not configured?

To recover, I had to:

sudo apt purge nvidia-*

sudo apt autoremove

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dkms/nvidia/

sudo apt install nvidia-dkms-550

(Reinstall Nvidia 550 drivers)

Why did I have to do all this? I ask that rhetorically, but Id like to know so I can understand what went wrong. Linux is non-trivial and people who deny that are not seeing things clearly. Then again, triviality of use isn’t particularly the most salient to me. Rather, it’s a mixture of is there enough compatibility to what I use my desktop for, is it reasonably easy to use for most tasks, and does it give me the freedom I want for the device.