Comment 56 for bug 200868

Ubuntu makes the installation of Nvidia drivers easy as in no other major distribution. Nobody forced the Ubuntu developers to so -- but they did, and personally I consider this a wise decision and one reason for the success of Ubuntu. I guess that most Ubuntu users with Nvidia graphic card do install the Nvidia driver.

But saying A means you also have to say B: You can't first invite the user to install the Nvidia driver and then present him/her with an obviously broken configuration tool. That's absurd! Fix it (papercut or not)!

From my experience, it is not sufficient to start nvidia-settings with gksudo. You first must prepare xorg.conf to contain (at least) these lines:

Section "Device"
      Identifier "Configured Video Device"
      Driver "nvidia"
EndSection

This is no major effort and should qualify as a papercut.