Canonical Hiring For An Ubuntu Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager

[9Strike]

Well considering we are dealing with games along with a monolithic kernel (linux) where the graphics are bundled with the kernel itself (assuming AMD here due to steamdeck, NVidia is a different story), this is a really big deal. In fact SteamOS used to run on debian and Valve to Arch precisely because they were having issues running really outdated kernels/packages.

Due to the huge amount of improvements that are only going to be available in the most recent kernels, i.e. the new mutex implementation your best bet will be running Arch or its derivatives.

I don't think this is likely the cause at all. If you just care about graphics drivers, Debian works just fine. Kernel and Mesa backports are nothing new and Debian has excellent tooling to deal with that. There is a reason why it has so many children after all.

Debian Stable is just not the kind of OS that fits for a Gaming Desktop due to it's stability focus.

[Ironmask]

This could also be something to do with the cloud, Cloud gaming is fast becoming a thing, And over time could remove the need to spend a lot of hard earned cash on expensive, High wattage components.

Not sure what universe you come from, but here Google Stadia crashed hard. And this time, it wasn't just Google's shitty marketing, it was actually an unviable and inefficient technology. I don't mean to repeat history with how people used to think sending a radio signal across the atlantic was impossible, but right now, viable datacenter-based game streaming looks technically impossible with our current understanding of physics. You simply can't make the particles go fast enough to support a seamless input, rendering, streaming pipeline. Cloud gaming is succeeding with local streaming from your own in-house computer/console, but that still requires you to own the hardware, you're just putting the display somewhere else in the house.

[CochainComplex]

Yes, Steam alone is very, very complex to install:

sudo apt install steam

Very complex and hard for some. They need to swap their distro soon for that reason alone.

Lol....I meant it became easier to install it on arch. It used to be more difficult. Now it is comparable to apt-get install steam....btw isn't it sudo apt-get install steam-installer nowadays?

[krzyzowiec]

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

According to the Steam Survey results of December 2021, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS 64-bit is the single most used Linux distribution at 17.90%, with Ubuntu 21.10 64-bit at 6.31%, totaling 24.27%. The next highest is Manjaro at 11.96%, and then Arch at 11.42%.

[mdedetrich]

I don't get this strong need for more recent kernels.
It seems that nvidia drivers are binary modules whose shim can be compiled for many different kernels as a module on demand.
AMD seems to send patches in to the mesa and kernel lists well before they release the hardware.

So far my issues with games were not on the driver but on the translation layer and therefore need more work and funding for wine, crossover and proton.
The only thing that really IS necessary for me : wine ppa , because the project moves a lot faster than ubuntus update.

I welcome this new position offer by Canonical and will watch what comes out of it.
I just think it is a problem that other companies can and should do more about.

Its an issue if you have an AMD card and you are point release distro (such as ubuntu), and as you stated you have to rely on PPA with kernels/wine on ubuntu.

This problem is fundamentally an issue using a monolithic kernel (Linux) along with point releases, thats a terrible combination for something like gaming which has always relied on having the latest drivers for your system (at least for the more popular games).

Not sure what universe you come from, but here Google Stadia crashed hard. And this time, it wasn't just Google's shitty marketing, it was actually an unviable and inefficient technology. I don't mean to repeat history with how people used to think sending a radio signal across the atlantic was impossible, but right now, viable datacenter-based game streaming looks technically impossible with our current understanding of physics. You simply can't make the particles go fast enough to support a seamless input, rendering, streaming pipeline. Cloud gaming is succeeding with local streaming from your own in-house computer/console, but that still requires you to own the hardware, you're just putting the display somewhere else in the house.

I game on geforce now and actually the latency is not that bad and in some cases its faster (for online games) due to the how internet connections work. Data centers often have more direct connections to network hubs where many game servers are located where as your typical home internet has a much lower priority and hence has to go through a lot more hops to reach the game server (you can verify this with traceroute).

For example I am overseas now with only a laptop and I am playing PoE. On Geforce now the ping from the NVidia data center to PoE's servers is like 3ms where as locally if I run PoE the ping is 15 ms so ironically the real latency is similar in both cases (except that I have much better performance since I am not rendering the game on a thin and light laptop)

[mdedetrich]

I don't think this is likely the cause at all. If you just care about graphics drivers, Debian works just fine. Kernel and Mesa backports are nothing new and Debian has excellent tooling to deal with that. There is a reason why it has so many children after all.

Correct me if I am wrong but I am pretty sure debian backports bugfixes, not features which doesn't help.

Particularly in the past couple of years a lot of features have been added which greatly help with games (one example is the new mutex implementation) and these kind of things are not backported (which makes sense since the whole point of debian stable is only to backport what is strictly necessary, i.e. security issues/bugs and not new features otherwise the whole point of point releases is pointless; pun intended)

Debian Stable is just not the kind of OS that fits for a Gaming Desktop due to it's stability focus.

True but this is a problem for game developers nonetheless, fragmentation exists in Linux and its made worse by having a monolithic kernel.

If Linux kernel wasn't monolithic, there would be no issue in running Debian stable with a newer GPU driver (for instance). This is completely normal in Windows, you have systems that are 5+ years old (i.e. Windows 10) which still get the latest graphics drivers for that new game that just came out.

[Ironmask]

Linux being monolithic doesn't have much to do with gaming/graphics, the graphics drivers (at least nvidia and AMD as far as I'm aware) are usermode, and the rest of the drivers don't matter. It's the same deal with Windows, GPU drivers are usermode where pretty much everything else (VGA, USB etc) is kernelmode.
What is a major issue is Xorg and how, if your GPU driver dies, so does Xorg, and so does everything running on top of it, which would be, well, your entire OS essentially. I don't know if Wayland fixes this but I haven't heard anything good. So if your GPU driver crashes (which happens in every OS), on Linux you're screwed, it's essentially a warm boot after that. On Windows the screen flickers for a second, that's it.

[Isedonde]

Its an issue if you have an AMD card and you are point release distro (such as ubuntu), and as you stated you have to rely on PPA with kernels/wine on ubuntu.

You don't need a PPA for kernels or mesa (unless you really need the very latest kernel/mesa, like for very new hardware) on Ubuntu, as Ubuntu releases an updated kernel and mesa every 6 months through the hardware enablement stack. When I was still using Ubuntu LTS, this has been good enough for me with a few exceptions (when there were great new features in mesa that I wanted ASAP, like aco for radv, or some new OpenGL features when that was still a thing).

Wine is a different story. The system wine package on this Ubuntu 21.10 install is still wine 5. And 22.04 might still ship wine 5, which is a couple of years old. I simply use lutris and Proton (for steam games) to get updated wine versions.

[mdedetrich]

You don't need a PPA for kernels or mesa (unless you really need the very latest kernel/mesa, like for very new hardware) on Ubuntu, as Ubuntu releases an updated kernel and mesa every 6 months through the hardware enablement stack. When I was still using Ubuntu LTS, this has been good enough for me with a few exceptions (when there were great new features in mesa that I wanted ASAP, like aco for radv, or some new OpenGL features when that was still a thing).

Yeah for gaming you do really need the latest kernel, again Steam moved away from debian based system in the early days of their SteamOS 3 (the one used on the steamdeck) for this reason.

The number of updates specifically for gaming in the latest mesa/kernel even in 6 months is massive, and the steam deck also has a launch timeline so they cant just wait around for ubuntu's next point release.

[mdedetrich]

Linux being monolithic doesn't have much to do with gaming/graphics, the graphics drivers (at least nvidia and AMD as far as I'm aware) are usermode, and the rest of the drivers don't matter. It's the same deal with Windows, GPU drivers are usermode where pretty much everything else (VGA, USB etc) is kernelmode.
What is a major issue is Xorg and how, if your GPU driver dies, so does Xorg, and so does everything running on top of it, which would be, well, your entire OS essentially. I don't know if Wayland fixes this but I haven't heard anything good. So if your GPU driver crashes (which happens in every OS), on Linux you're screwed, it's essentially a warm boot after that. On Windows the screen flickers for a second, that's it.

Well that actually isn't entirely true, the interface for the graphics card is obviously in usermode but the actual core features of graphics cards is done in the kernel (or in the case of NVidia runs alongside the kernel that talks directly to the relevant parts of the kernel).

MESA is the layer that goes between the low level graphics card implementation (which is in the kernel) and the usermode implementation of API's such as OpenGL.

So if there are actual improvements in the core driver, this is not user level.

If the NVidia blob or AMD/Intel actual drier ran in userland, it would be ridiculously slow. No modern kernel runs graphics in userland since Windows 9x days for that reason.