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With Mesa coming along rather nicely in the latest releases, Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical push out Mesa updates to their official graphics driver PPA to help Feral officially support Mesa in their Linux ports.

Edwin, FeralWe have been working with the Mesa community to help improve the Mesa drivers so more games can run on AMD and Intel hardware, and in the last year this has started to hit the tipping point and support has become more and more viable when using the very latest drivers.

Part of the problem is that Mesa on Ubuntu is often outdated, meaning if Feral (and other game developers) want to give support for it, there needs to be an easy and tested way to get the latest open source GPU drivers.
Edwin, FeralThe biggest issue we have is there is no way for a user to officially download and install the latest stable versions of Mesa. For example because the official Mesa 13.0.1 release isn’t available to install on Ubuntu, you need to compile it yourself.

Adding tested packages to the official PPA would be an ideal solution for now:
Edwin, FeralI’d like to suggest that official Mesa releases are also added to the graphics-drivers PPA using the release information on the mesa.org website: http://www.mesa3d.org/relnotes.html

You can see the full mailing list entry here.

Hopefully this will get sorted, so users on AMD and Intel can get the best gaming experience possible on Ubuntu.

Not everyone is comfortable compiling things, and I agree that users shouldn't be required to go and compile graphics drivers to get stable versions of Mesa. While there are other PPA's around, they usually provide packages from git which can come with all sorts of breakage. This could benefit a lot of people.

Additional note: The less PPA's people have to add, the more secure they may be. It was an issue raised in our IRC that people flock to all sorts of random PPA's (guilty!), so having a trusted one for this would be awesome. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Mesa
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36 comments
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soulsource Nov 18, 2016
AMDGPU-Pro is targeted at workstation users, as confirmed by AMD's John Bridgman over at the Phoronix forums:
Quoting: John Bridgmanthe primary driver for consumer use will be the all-open stack
ZekThePenguin Nov 18, 2016
Really the Mesa drivers work better for me than the proprietary ones. (Especially with APUs!)
Would LOVE to see Mesa kept up-to-date on Ubuntu-based OSes! I'm currently using Solus, but I know many people's entrance into Linux is through Ubuntu. Would be great to see that work well.
On a side note, it would also be nice to see Steam update its runtime. It has been pretty janky lately.
pete910 Nov 18, 2016
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Or better still, use different distro
cRaZy-bisCuiT Nov 18, 2016
Quoting: pete910Or better still, use different distro
^_^
Leopard Nov 18, 2016
It's a fair request.

Fear of security and stability won't be a problem.In Linux Mint,there are three update levels.One for new users,it also has a description for it.This option has very limited update options.It doesn't even update Linux kernel.

Second one is recommended,Linux kernel and kernel security updates available.

Third one is higly experimental,for pro users.

With options like this,there won't be a problem.Leave it to user choice
manero666 Nov 18, 2016
What to expect from the Ubuntu repos?
They still have Wine1.4 and 1.6 as the official options...
cRaZy-bisCuiT Nov 18, 2016
Quoting: manero666What to expect from the Ubuntu repos?
They still have Wine1.4 and 1.6 as the official options...
I think they missed the needs of their customers. People running a server wouldn't go for Ubuntu most of the time, people using multimedia and gaming would benefit greatly from new driver- and Mesa stacks being released more often.
minj Nov 18, 2016
QuoteAdditional note: The less PPA's people have to add, the more secure they may be. It was an issue raised in our IRC that people flock to all sorts of random PPA's (guilty!), so having a trusted one for this would be awesome.
You know what the smallest natural number is? 0

As in, abolish PPAs... and apt(-get) as well while you are at it and get yourself a proper package manager, i. e. pacman. It's in the name, dogg. Seriously, not only it has the best CLI API I've ever seen but it also goes well with PKGBUILDs (tailored build scripts to create your own packages as easily as by typing `makepkg`).

But they are going the other way, I hear. One paved with opaque automatic binary updates that can roll back automatically if they fail, or NOT. More power to them, then! Or NOT.


Last edited by minj on 18 November 2016 at 6:09 pm UTC
Erikcht Nov 18, 2016
Hi, i am AMD user.

my problem is it


I am a Dell user
Notebook.
WITHOUT AMD DRIVER THAT USE CATALYST, I cannot switch it by ubuntu to force on steam for linux
I hope this changes with an easy way on Mesa + ubuntu


Last edited by Erikcht on 18 November 2016 at 7:04 pm UTC
orochi_kyo Nov 18, 2016
I did post something related to this in another thread here, and now Feral is saying what we most of us already know: If updating software and drivers become easier, without the need of going to the terminal, adding a new repository and installing software from there, or waiting for a new version of the distro to be released, it would make Linux a much more friendly platform.
Not only compiling stuff is annoying but the fact that going to the terminal scares a lot of potential users who want to get away from Windows. Mayor linux distributions needs a driver update center away from synaptic or app manager, so driver devs can post there the lastest stable drivers and then the user will be asked if he wants to update...
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