Canonical Hiring For An Ubuntu Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager

[CochainComplex]

Steam Hardware and Software survey says the opposite.

Well this is not wrong but compared to 10 years ago gamers used to use mostly Ubuntu - now there are a lot more users on Arch, Manjaro...
Steam, Lutris, gamemode and co are way easier to install on rpm based Distros.

[Tuxee]

I'm mostly an Ubuntu user, I game on Ubuntu and it could shine with little interest and effort, all it needs is to pack modern Mesa and more recent Kernel IE: Kisak mesa fresh, Liquorix Kernel and modern Firmware package.

I will never understand why the LTS desktop edition of Ubuntu provides with an up-to-date copy of browsers but not Mesa/Kernel/Firmware.

You are aware that they do, aren't you? It's called HWE stack and while it is not bleeding edge, you will get at least the versions of the non-LTS versions of kernel, mesa, X and assume the firmware files. As far as browsers go: How are their dependencies? How likely is it, that an update to Firefox 91 will break any other application?

[moilami]

This is good news, surprisingly, considering this is news about Canonical. Now they at least try to make their desktop gaming friendly. They should start it up by making a gaming repo which updates kernels and drivers frequently, with some sort of easy method to downgrade kernel, MESA, and proprietary graphics drivers.

[CochainComplex]

That's like saying GNOME doesn't allow customizations because it's not included and/or enabled by default. That's why the offer extensions with the ability to turn them on and off. And you can make your own if something is not suitable.

Newer Mesa is not that big of an issue anymore. It's not Mesa v17. At some point they have to freeze a stable version. And then that version keeps getting incremental updates. If you want newer Mesa, you go with a PPA. Kisak PPA, oibaf PPA, ernst PPA.

For the kernel, they have the HWE version. I don't use it, I build my own. But the options are there.

Snap is the only thing extremely questionable and I agree with everyone. But they've improved on that. I have no problem with Firefox being a snap by default. Do I want it as a snap by default? Absolutely not. But I can change that. If I have to change one or two or three things that I prefer over how Ubuntu thinks it should be rolled out, so be it.

So many people distro hop every week instead of taking a solid distro and just building on that. Making backups in case anything goes wrong. And incrementally improving.

The solutions are out there; I just think people don't want to hear them or enjoy complaining. Not talking about you, just in general.

I totally agree with you somehow. I'm doing the exact same with my PopOs "Ubuntu spinoff". But I have just started to checkout gentoo and building (almost) the entire os with aocc 3.2 without interfering with other LLVM based compilers is so much easier.
Setting up portage env files for individual packages with different flags and compilers is just a delightful discovery. "ebuild -e --kepp-going @world" and a few hours later 940 out 945 pkgs are built against aocc.

I have started with Ubuntu roughly 10years ago and I have switched to PopOS around 2 years ago because of snaps and other issues. Now I'm feeling to go another route. Lets see. PopOS will still be my dayly driver. But other distros might suite my developing needs more.

p.s.: Oibaf and Kisak are great but they do not only ship just drivers they also give you the llvm dependencies which are also a bit outdated on ubuntu. I also had to get the gcc from toolchain repo or eg. netext.

So finally to make stock ubuntu run splendid you need to change/add in by repos: Kernel, Drivers, Displayserver/Prot Toolchain (Dependencies). There is not much left from Hardware to your display which has not been replaced.

[Setif]

now there are a lot more users on Arch, Manjaro...

The migration to Arch-based distributions has many reasons, gaming is just one of them.
Most users migrated because they want more control on their distribution, or/and to get the latest softwares. Most of those immigrants are long-time Linux users ( 10+ years and they know what they are doing).

[Mez']

Currently there are 5 actively supported Ubuntu releases (if ignoring those with extended support). Your suggestion would realistically need 5 releases too - the LTS versions and standard production versions commonly need a support period overlap, even Fedora continues to keep some kind of support for the previous version for everyone to have time to migrate from a supported release N-1 to a supported release N.

I can only think of 3.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu 21.10
And a fourth every other year (22.04 soon).

[Mez']

The migration to Arch-based distributions has many reasons, gaming is just one of them.
Most users migrated because they want more control on their distribution, or/and to get the latest softwares. Most of those immigrants are long-time Linux users ( 10+ years and they know what they are doing).

Fitting that description indeed. I'm now using Manjaro on the laptop (80% of the time) and Ubuntu on the desktop (20), after 14 years exclusively on Ubuntu (and another couple years of distro hopping before that).

[rmfx]

steam isolates games from os, they'll work on other distros just as well

LoL. Because you think that Linux games work the exact same on every distro because they run with proton ? Nop…

[piorunz]

Year of Linux just around the corner! 😁

[Black_Fox]

I can only think of 3.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu 21.10
And a fourth every other year (22.04 soon).

Oh, my mistake, I looked up the Wikipedia page originally and counted the 22.04 LTS as well, sorry for that. The other one is 21.04 that's still supported until January 20. That makes up to 3 LTS supported releases and up to 2 supported non-LTS releases at any time (but probably not 5 at the same time?).