I had a nice email from Jorge Castro of Canonical today, and it seems they are looking at ways for Ubuntu users to get newer Nvidia graphics drivers in an easier fashion.
Currently, if you want to get newer drivers you need to either download them directly from Nvidia, which can get messy and confusing. Or even more annoying is to find a random PPA with more up to date drivers, neither is a very nice option, and it could be made a lot easier for the end user.
They look to still be going down the route of a PPA, but it's possible that the "additional drivers" manager will have an option for the latest upstream driver, and this would enable an official PPA. I think that's a fantastic solution, to an increasingly annoying problem. Bigger games are coming to Linux, and they are starting to need specific driver versions, so this needs to be looked at.
He also spoke about bringing in some of the latest stuff from SteamOS, so that would benefit gamers too.
You can see the mailing list entry here. It's a post well worth reading, and good to see the Ubuntu guys focus on gaming some more.
I will open up the floor to you lovely knowledgeable people for your thoughts on this.
...but I guess some people want to have their cake and eat it too :P
Quoting: minjFor latest software (and bugs) people typically use rolling-release distros like Arch/Manjaro..
You'd be amazed how stable Arch has been for me..
Anyway, it should be as easy as booting the OS the first time, window pops up asking which drivers to install. And don't mess things up with driver versions scrambled all over the place, people still don't know what version to install that way. just put the latest on top, with the label "latest driver" or something and put the damn driver in the repo's
Installing the driver on Arch is nothing more than "pacman -S nvidia".. done
Ubuntu especially should make this very easy to do
Quoting: Spl-itI know, I'm using ManjaroQuoting: minjFor latest software (and bugs) people typically use rolling-release distros like Arch/Manjaro..
You'd be amazed how stable Arch has been for me..
Quoting: Spl-itdon't mess things up with driver versions scrambled all over the place, people still don't know what version to install that way. just put the latest on top, with the label "latest driver" or something and put the damn driver in the repo'sYes they should have two options: 'stable' (default) and 'most recent'. All those [-backports]-updates etc package names used to drive me nuts.
It would be good if other Ubuntu/Debian based distributions did the same thing. It has been mentioned a few times in the past to blank faces.
Last edited by on 11 August 2015 at 9:30 pm UTC
After you set things up (Arch / Manjaro) you don't need to worry anymore.
And that's the main reason I may switch from Manjaro (altho I really doubt it), but I won't leave Arch-based distros.
Last edited by kalin on 11 August 2015 at 8:54 pm UTC
abelthorne Aug 11, 2015
Quoting: liamdaweThat's true but if this was supposed to address the newer drivers updates issue, they'd rather fix this instead of trying to find even more broken solutions like adding a PPA.Quoting: abelthorneIn the drivers tool that's supplied with Ubuntu, they have *-updates versions of the graphic drivers. Isn't it supposed to be a way to have up-to-date drivers or have I been mistaken for years?
That whole thing is currently a mess, and needs better descriptions.
Segata Sanshiro Aug 11, 2015
no_information_here Aug 12, 2015
Reading more of the mailing list thread, I see that they are wanting something less "bleeding edge" than the xorg-edgers PPA. I have been using edgers for a while quite successfully but I think it includes more experimental packages, beyond just the nvidia drivers.
A "semi-official" driver PPA sounds like a great start!
Last edited by khalismur on 12 August 2015 at 5:13 am UTC
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