Canonical Hiring For An Ubuntu Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Hiring For An Ubuntu Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager

Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Desktop-Gaming-PM

[CochainComplex]

I think they fear lossing users by valves shift from debian to arch. Besides ubuntu is less present amongst gamers for the reasons written in the article.

edit.: follwing post by Setif requests some data to backup my claims

https://www.linuxgame.net/dynamic/st...ux_distros.png

http://www.cluoma.com/images/steam_linux_distros.png

https://boilingsteam.com/which-linux...urvey-results/

by less present I mean declining

[Setif]

Besides ubuntu is less present amongst gamers

Steam Hardware and Software survey says the opposite.

[Danny3]

No shit!
They, who wanted to drop 32bit support?
They need to hire a new guy to tell them to update game related programs and libraries like WINE, WINEtricks and SDL ?
The latest 21.10 version came with pretty old stuff. Good luck gaming with that, especially on Wayland.
How about using PipeWire by default like other distros to have good sound, maybe even surround, much needed in competitive online games and for OBS screen capture and streaming that some gamers want to do ?
And how about using a recent kernel like 5.16 which comes with game specific improvements like Futex2 and zstd decompression speed improvements which is much needed for people who use BTRFS filesystem compressed with Zstd algorithm ?

I don't even want to talk about the fact that their default DE doesn't even support Adaptive sync.

So no, I don't believe Canonical is actually serious about improving gaming support!

[uid313]

I am surprised! I thought that Canonical didn't care much about the Linux desktop and only card about Ubuntu on the cloud and on IoT.

[M@GOid]

They have to hire a new guy just to maintain a couple PPAs for graphic drivers and joysticks? The current staff must be very allergic to gaming, to think they need to create a new position just for that. But hey, if that means I can have official support for current stable drivers and possibly kernels, more power for them.

[M@GOid]

I am surprised! I thought that Canonical didn't care much about the Linux desktop and only card about Ubuntu on the cloud and on IoT.

I don't blame them. Laser focus on the Linux desktop was what almost bankrupted them. The money always was on the enterprise, not on the sea of freeloaders like myself, that only complain on Phoronix and don't generate any revenue.

But they still make important contributions to Gnome, much to the annoyance of the current maintainers, to be constantly remained that their beloved Gnome needed a lot of patches.

[anarki2]

Linux gaming, yeah right. It's not April 1st yet... no one cares.

[Quackdoc]

this is good I guess, canonical's crippling ineptitude lies not in the skills of their devs, but it the... odd directions they take them. hopefully more hands on deck can help out linux gaming as a whole. hehe

[theuserbl]

Beside driver, Mesa and Vulcan, there is in my eyes especially for gamer to following function usefull:
- showing with a key combination in every full screen game in every resolution the fps (frames per second), the ping and other usefull infos. For example the temperature of the CPU and GPU and its usage rate. How active the ventilation of them are. etc.
- toggle with a key combination the recording with OBS on/off. And it should be possible to only manage OBS with the key combinations without a visible OBS.
- easy handling of TeamSpeak 3.