Ubuntu drivers sees drivers I dont have

Question

If I run ubuntu-drivers list the output is:

bcmwl-kernel-source
nvidia-driver-396
nvidia-driver-390
nvidia-340

No clue what bcmwl is, but nvidia drivers 340 and 390 I have uninstalled. Why are they still displayed?

Answer 1

When you typed your command it listed what is installed. In my case:

$ ubuntu-drivers list
nvidia-384

In your case you appear to have three nVidia drivers installed; nvidia-driver-396, nvidia-driver-390 and nvidia-340.

Additionally you have a WiFi driver (I believe) installed called: 'bcmwl'.

To completely remove your nVidia drivers you need to refer to: How can I uninstall a nvidia driver completely ?.

Answer 2

This is caused by a bug in ubuntu-drivers in my opinion. I've also seen two separate instances of the same problem where the ubuntu-drivers list command gave the following output:

nvidia-driver-390
nvidia-340

However only nvidia-driver-390 was actually installed.

Because one of the systems that produced this unexpected output was my own, I ran apt policy nvidia-340 and got the following results.

$ apt policy nvidia-340
nvidia-340:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 340.106-0ubuntu3

nvidia-340 had been installed on my system at one time, but it was removed when after I upgraded it to nvidia-driver-390. The bug appears to be that ubuntu-drivers list does not know that nvidia-340 has been removed.

In the other instance of this problem that I know about ubuntu-drivers list produced the same output as shown above in the second paragraph, and once again apt policy nvidia-340 showed that nvidia-340 was not installed.