An engineer needs to completely remove NVIDIA GPU drivers from an Ubuntu 22.

The correct command sequence is sudo apt-get purge nvidia-* & & sudo apt-get autoremove. Purging removes NVIDIA driver packages and their configuration files, while autoremove removes dependency packages that were installed automatically and are no longer required. NVIDIA’s current data center driver removal guidance for Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 uses apt remove --autoremove --purge with NVIDIA-related package patterns, including driver, Fabric Manager, firmware, headless, DKMS, compute, decode, encode, and related libraries. A simple apt-get remove nvidia-driver-550 removes only one package and may leave DKMS modules, libraries, configuration files, Fabric Manager packages, or version-specific dependencies behind. Manually deleting /usr/lib/nvidia is unsafe because it bypasses package management and can leave the system in an inconsistent state. ubuntu-drivers uninstall is not the most complete answer for fully purging all NVIDIA driver components during conflict troubleshooting. After removal, administrators should verify loaded modules, package state, and reboot before installing the intended validated driver stack. Clean removal is important in AI infrastructure because driver conflicts can break CUDA, NCCL, DCGM, Fabric Manager, and container runtime behavior.