nvidia vs. nvidia-updates?

Question

OK, so I haven't find any answer, only one that claims the "nvidia-updates" is newer versions, yet the driver instalator says this:

4 options:

nvidia 331.113, nvidia-updates 331.113, legacy nvidia 304.125, legacy nvidia-updates 304.125

Which one to install? What's the difference between nvidia and nvidia-updates? Since both report as the same version.

Which should I choose? Legacy or non-legacy? Both 331.113 and legacy 304.125 were released at the same day, bot are supported by my card.. Which is GT520M

https://www.nvidia.co.uk/download/driverResults.aspx/80563/en-uk AND http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/80133/en-us

They have some common changelogs.. so I'm confused. And new non-legacy drivers are still being developed for this GPU.

And last question. Why the driver is so outdated? It's from 2014.

Answer 1

I marked this as a duplicate of What's the difference between the nvidia-current, and nvidia-current-updates packages?

However, to answer your last question:

"Why the driver is so outdated? It's from 2014"

If you go here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html you will see that version 340 is a legacy version. Legacy versions are long-lived, and don't get feature updates but only bug-fixes. The current long-lived branch is base version 352, and short-lived is 355. Base version 331 is a short-lived branch that has expired so it isn't updated any more (not even bug-fixes like the legacy 340 does). The only drivers for Linux that are still updated are the ones shown on the link above (legacy and current long & short lived branches).