To Canonical/Nvidia defense, while they do remove support for older chips, they always do that in major updates. You, as the user, can avoid this by using nvidi

To Canonical/Nvidia defense, while they do remove support for older chips, they always do that in major updates. You, as the user, can avoid this by using nvidia-<number> package, not the nvidia-current one. I have a machine, that has GPU supported in nvidia-340, but no later driver. Ubuntu only updates to the newer -340 packages, it does not skip to the highest possible number available.