The safest way to remove the nvidia driver is to do $ dpkg -l | grep nvidia I realize that this is an old answer, but I have to add an answer here for sake of clarity and system stability.įirst off, the * is an expansion operator for the shell which will grab everything and remove a lot of files you don't need to remove. In summary sudo apt-get remove -purge '^nvidia-.*'Įcho 'nouveau' | sudo tee -a /etc/modulesĪlthough all above commands not needed, this is my way to completely purge the nvidia driver and use the open source nounveau. Last, search for the nf file and remove it as well sudo rm /etc/X11/nf If you want to be sure that nouveau will be load in boot, you can force-load it by add it to /etc/modules echo 'nouveau' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules With purge command it should UN-blacklisted. So after above command you should also give the installation command for ubuntu-desktop package sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktopĪlso sometimes the nouveau driver get blacklisted from nvidia driver. * in the end means (Purge everything that begins ( ^) with the name nvidia-)Ībove command will also remove the nvidia-common package and the nvidia-common package has as a dependency the ubuntu-desktop package. If you want to be sure that you will purge everything related to nvidia you can give this command sudo apt-get remove -purge '^nvidia-.*' dpkg -l | grep -i nvidiaĮxcept the package nvidia-common all other packages should be purged. Search what packages from nvidia you have installed.

No need to blacklist something, but sometimes maybe a force-load of the nouveau module needed.

If you remove -purge the nvidia driver you will be OK. You can open a terminal with Ctrl + Alt+ T keys combo.

Nvidia removal tool