Quoting: finaldestCorrect me if I am wrong but surly freezing the library would make it impossible to use newer GFX drivers.

I plan to upgrade my ryzen desktop CPU soon and may consider Navi GPU further down the line. How am I supposed to get the latest drivers if the packages are frozen?

Canonical said something about case by case handling, but given it's not their priority, I wouldn't expect them to do it in timely fashion. For same reason Mesa users tend to prefer rolling distros, Ubuntu with some kind of special Mesa exception is not going to be a good choice. New hardware just amplifies the issue.

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Quoting: subWhich is VERY unfortunate because I actually like companies trying new stuff and being courageous - so I feel a bit bad when bashing such efforts - but it was just a stupid idea and not helpful at all. :/

Sure, I'm all for progress and innovation. But one that doesn't break user experience or creates a huge rift in the Linux desktop (like Mir almost did).

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Quoting: MohandevirBad project managment.

Canonical are known for that. It's not the first time. :) Remember the whole Mir vs Wayland debacle? It's not far off from that.

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Quoting: liamdaweSounds like Wine still won't work: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/i386-architecture-will-be-dropped-starting-with-eoan-ubuntu-19-10/11263/121?u=liamdawe [External Link]

It's good that he is highlighting the problem with their proposed plan:

So the solutions proposed in [4] like containers and snaps based on 18.04 will not fully work.

That was quite obvious.

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Quoting: GuestPersonally, i do not expect Valve's decision to come quickly. If one of their devs says there is no real desktop distro after having ditched ubuntu so rapidly, i guess it means they were thinking about it for quite a while ad still haven't found what they were looking for.

Their investment in KDE/KWin looks interesting. I wonder if it's part of their plan to improve Linux desktop experience.

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Yeah, I don't think they are backtracking. They mentioned containers and stale libraries approach a while ago already. But it was never a good proposal.

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32-bit mesa will be available in the Ubuntu 18.04 repository. Note that mesa already gets updates in 18.04 which track the versions from later Ubuntu releases, as part of hardware enablement. If incompatibilities are introduced beyond 20.04 (which is the cutoff for hardware enablement backports for 18.04), we will need to address them on a case-by-case basis.

That doesn't sound reassuring. Why create a problem that needs to be "addressed on case by case basis"? It will horrendously complicate things for those who want to build things themselves.

I so far don't see Ubuntu remaining a good option for gamers.

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Quoting: EikeWill people be able to do install newer GPU drivers nevertheless, when the respective 32 bit libs are "frozen"?

Nope, since they can require newer features in the lower stack. The whole stack is interdependent. Think of Mesa periodically bumping their dependencies for its build. That will quickly go bust, once they are frozen.

Even if Ubuntu will address that once in a while "on case by case basis", I doubt it they'll be able to do it for all 32-bit libraries that we care about. Or in the timely manner. So why even bother falling into that pit?

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Frozen libraries are not a solution. Think of Mesa, Wine, dxvk and the rest of the gaming stack rapidly progressing. Ubuntu proposes to freeze them going forward (for 32-bit). Or "address them on case by case basis" once in a while. I doubt gamers will appreciate it, when other distros are not proposing anything that crippling.

I see only two working solutions here:

1. Keep providing up to date x86_32 multiarch (most distros will be doing it in the foreseeable future).
2. Come up with solution to run 32-bit programs, using 64-bit libraries with good performance, no 32-bit libs involved at all.

#2 can be tricky, and until it's ready, #1 should be available. Since Ubuntu can't provide either, gamers should just switch to other distros.

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Quoting: RCL

Quoting: ShmerlGames aren't distributed as part of the distro, so distro shouldn't really matter. Same as today, you can play games using any distro you want.

This was in context of a gaming-oriented paid distro a la SteamOS proposed by someone earlier.

I think gaming oriented should be focused on UI, DE, compositor and all working well with gaming scenarios. Such as modern Wayland compositor supporting adaptive sync and so on. Open implementation of VR, and etc. All that can be open source. Whether you pay developers to work on it, depends on how they set it up. Patreon is a good option. So games themselves don't really prevent gaming oriented support of the distro from being fully open.

Personally, when it comes to distros and projects, I'd pay for open source development. Not for closed one.

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