Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Planning To Stick With Linux 5.15 By Default

[reba]

Simple, my dear Debian upstream:

Ubuntu is the only LTS distro that also provides an official 1000 Hz + PREEMPT Linux kernel (lowlatency), which just so happens to be a very nice fit for gaming purposes, aswell as provide for an overall better desktop experience, too.

Just can't find this much convenience on any other enterprise-focused distro out there, that's all!

Hm. But the kernel ist just another package and can be swapped to something different extremely easy.
As I understand it, gamers tend do be able and are somewhat used to tweak their games settings or config files or modify their system in different ways to improve gaming performance.
So why should switching the kernel with a simple four-liner:

echo "deb http://deb.xanmod.org releases main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xanmod-kernel.list
wget -qO - "https://dl.xanmod.org/gpg.key" | apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/xanmod-kernel.gpg add -
apt-get --yes update
apt-get --yes install linux-xanmod

be considered too hard for gamers? When they're able to install and operate a whole *buntu distribution.

[CochainComplex]

Hm. But the kernel ist just another package and can be swapped to something different extremely easy.
As I understand it, gamers tend do be able and are somewhat used to tweak their games settings or config files or modify their system in different ways to improve gaming performance.
So why should switching the kernel with a simple four-liner:

echo "deb http://deb.xanmod.org releases main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xanmod-kernel.list
wget -qO - "https://dl.xanmod.org/gpg.key" | apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/xanmod-kernel.gpg add -
apt-get --yes update
apt-get --yes install linux-xanmod

be considered too hard for gamers? When they're able to install and operate a whole *buntu distribution.

for gamers I would recommend
apt-get --yes install linux-xanmod-tt

....the tasktype scheduler is the sucessor of the cacule sched and has proven quite beneficial for low latency gaming.

[mitch074]

Then can, just do two ubuntu version:
- ubuntu enterprise LTS
- ubuntu desktop with is more of a rolling release.
You just can not make one distro with fits enterprise long term support and gaming/regular users.

True. Even Microsoft does that with Windows 10 : Enterprise users don't get the forced upgrades every 6 months like "normal" users, it's once every 2 years instead.
As for gaming on Ubuntu LTS... It's perfectly possible, provided you upgrade the kernel and mesa. The hardware enablement stack is the "easy" way, using kernel and mesa PPAs goes one step further. Personally I'm stuck on kernel 5.13 though, as I need Virtualbox to work and more recent kernels won't install easily.
I don't mind though, all my games run quite well.

[skeevy420]

Because Steam includes all those shitload old and 32bit libraries so us using it doesn't have to. Kinda like snaps etc. The apps itself have their own libraries. So there won't be incompatibilities caused by libraries.

That was the point of my post...most of it. I intentionally didn't go into the chase the FPS dragon aspect of using Native libraries over the Runtime. I mean, yeah, that's a thing, but it doesn't seem as necessary of a thing as it used to which was the other point.

[skeevy420]

Simple, my dear Debian upstream:

Ubuntu is the only LTS distro that also provides an official 1000 Hz + PREEMPT Linux kernel (lowlatency), which just so happens to be a very nice fit for gaming purposes, aswell as provide for an overall better desktop experience, too.

Just can't find this much convenience on any other enterprise-focused distro out there, that's all!

Well, Manjaro also provides an official 1000Hz + PREEMPT linux kernel and is the OS that Steam suggests that Linux gamers use until SteamOS 3.0 comes out.

Yeah, yeah....I heard ya say LTS and enterprise-focused

[dragonn]

True. Even Microsoft does that with Windows 10 : Enterprise users don't get the forced upgrades every 6 months like "normal" users, it's once every 2 years instead.
As for gaming on Ubuntu LTS... It's perfectly possible, provided you upgrade the kernel and mesa. The hardware enablement stack is the "easy" way, using kernel and mesa PPAs goes one step further. Personally I'm stuck on kernel 5.13 though, as I need Virtualbox to work and more recent kernels won't install easily.
I don't mind though, all my games run quite well.

The problem with HES or custom PPAs are they are not default, a new Linux user is gonna try Ubuntu, since it is consider to be the "to go distro" for new users and find out that it works like crap on they new laptop/desktop because it doesn't have working drivers for half the hardware they have and they gonna say "f**** this, I am going back to Windows".
About Virtualbox, I don't get it, I am running Virtualbox on 5.16 working just fine, Arch never pushed a kernel update to stable if stuff like Virtualbox/Nvidia driver isn't working.
This only shows how unmaintainable Ubuntu is once you go anything beyond the provided defaults.

[wertigon]

And what, pray tell, is stopping Ubuntu from backporting certain important drivers to 5.15?

No, you do not need the most recent kernel to have the most recent hardware. It helps but is not a must.

Remember that very few gamers use the latest and greatest, less than 5 percent according to Steam HW survey.

[Linuxxx]

Hm. But the kernel ist just another package and can be swapped to something different extremely easy.
As I understand it, gamers tend do be able and are somewhat used to tweak their games settings or config files or modify their system in different ways to improve gaming performance.
So why should switching the kernel with a simple four-liner:

echo "deb http://deb.xanmod.org releases main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xanmod-kernel.list
wget -qO - "https://dl.xanmod.org/gpg.key" | apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/xanmod-kernel.gpg add -
apt-get --yes update
apt-get --yes install linux-xanmod

be considered too hard for gamers? When they're able to install and operate a whole *buntu distribution.

You obviously missed the "official" part, as in officially supported by Ubuntu.
And BTW, how is the QA like with XanMod?

Also, from my own testing, XanMod resulted in noticeably lower FPS with RPCS3 than Ubuntu's lowlatency, because XanMod is tweaking towards latency too much, to the detriment of throughput; not unlike using this "KTweak" script to the same effect on any kernel:

https://github.com/tytydraco/KTweak

[Linuxxx]

Well, Manjaro also provides an official 1000Hz + PREEMPT linux kernel and is the OS that Steam suggests that Linux gamers use until SteamOS 3.0 comes out.

Yeah, yeah....I heard ya say LTS and enterprise-focused

Exactly!

Just one nitpick:

The kernel You linked to is in fact a so-called "hard" real-time Linux kernel, which actually reduces throughput quite measurably and therefore makes games perform worse.

Valve will most likely use Arch's default kernel config, which unfortunately still defaults to 300 Hz + PREEMPT (thus "soft" real-time), whereas 1000 Hz would be better to further lower latency while just barely lowering throughput performance.

Anyhow, still better than previously-used Debian's 250 Hz + voluntary PREEMPT on SteamOS.

[F.Ultra]

As a Debian user I can understand the selection of 5.25 for LTS Ubuntu.

I just wonder - why Ubuntu at all? Snaps, Lock-In, Canonical... why? also upstream Debian provides Gnome, KDE, XFCE et al from a single distribution without spreading it thin with Kubuntu, Xubuntu spin-offs; they're just packages on a base system, after all.

What lock-in? And in what way does "canonical" have to do with my experience using Ubuntu for say gaming?