Feral Interactive have pushed another patch to Mesa to help fix up the 'radv' Vulkan driver

Quoting: t3gMesa has been updated with a lot of cool features lately, but its too bad distros like Ubuntu are always behind.

If you add Padoka Ppa,you will get latest stable Mesa.So that is not a problem.

Most people don't know to do that, which is why Linux gets such a bad rep, they come, try it out and notice its terrible and leave even thought the distro is rolling OLD broken mesa among other things in the repository. At least for AMD users, if NVIDIA users can get past the black screen and full composition issue then their fine.

Quoting: TheRiddickMost people don't know to do that, which is why Linux gets such a bad rep, they come, try it out and notice its terrible and leave even thought the distro is rolling OLD broken mesa among other things in the repository. At least for AMD users, if NVIDIA users can get past the black screen and full composition issue then their fine.

You mean adding a ppa is harder than trawling ihv sites for updated drivers? ;)

The users you are talking about will have difficulty managing any OS.

You assume they should know about PPA usage at the start, when its not mentioned anywhere upon installing most Ubuntu distro's. PPA could mean anything.


Last edited by TheRiddick on 11 March 2017 at 11:59 am UTC

Quoting: TheRiddickYou assume they should know about PPA usage at the start, when its not mentioned anywhere upon installing most Ubuntu distro's. PPA could mean anything.

I don't assume anything. New Windows users don't know anything about downloading and installing drivers either.

They don't need to, the distro comes with them.

Both downloading Windows drivers as well as adding PPA's is a bad thing for the user experience, both require that the user is computer literate. As far as I am concerned, and the fact that it is needed on Windows, should not mean that we can relax as Linux community. Drivers are unfortunately still one of the most prominent reasons why Linux is being held back for wider adoption, the more we can do to improve it the better. Distributions have done great things in this regards, but the balance between stability and new hardware support is a though one for distributions and there is a lot of work left.

Both the out-of-the-box experience, as the ease how slightly outdated systems can be updated, are areas of concern. PPA is not unacceptable, but a situation is preferred where it is not needed at all and distributions feed the right driver to users without them thinking about it. If security concerns are a reason to feed updates to users, why not hotfixes for the latest games/hardware?

Actually it concerns me a lot, especially because of RADV. We badly need Vulkan, but if RADV becomes necessary for a good gaming experience, there will be a long period where we need bleeding edge Mesa version on our systems, and unfortunately you then get the "compile your own kernel and Mesa" user experience of Linux. Not good to attract gamers.


Last edited by dmantione on 11 March 2017 at 12:20 pm UTC

Most videocards come with a driver disc or warning on the box to get latest drivers from a website. Now for NVIDIA that isn't so bad as they have Linux drivers out there for you to easily see and they ARE the latest, provided the user doesn't get blackscreen upon install (very common), and is able to figure out howto install them from bash (annoying for new users).

AMD's website will cause you to find the OLD fglrx drivers for Linux which will give you a rather frustrating experience to say the least.

My limited experience with the PRO driver was anything but a smooth experience. The only game that slightly improved was Deus Ex. I quickly ran back to Mesa haha. I don't mind compiling the latest version though, I often check the Mesa git page for new features like a kid in a candy shop.