Feral Joins The Bandwagon Of Wanting Newer Mesa On Ubuntu

[d2kx]

I thought this was the whole purpose of Hardware Enablement Stacks for LTS versions of Ubuntu. An updated kernel+xorg+mesa every 6 months isn't that bad, is it? Perhaps I am not very bleeding-edge oriented.
Is this about having even more frequent updates? Honest question here, not trying to be a smart-ass or anything.

At least for Debian, there is always backports. I'm running mesa 12.0.4 on Debian stable, which I guess is not that bad...?

The current Mesa in Ubuntu 16.04.1 is Mesa 11.2. Because Mesa 13.0 was late for Ubuntu 16.10, it only shipped with Mesa 12.0 and the first HWE backport for Ubuntu 16.04(.2) in February 2017 will therefore also just have Mesa 12.0. Finally, Ubuntu 17.04 in April will have Mesa 13.0+ and the next HWE backport, Ubuntu 16.04.3 in August 2017 will then have Mesa 13.0.

You need Mesa 13.0 for some current games, and users of Ubuntu LTS will get it in August 2017. That is the problem.

[franglais125]

...

Thanks for the explanation! I hadn't actually looked at the version numbers for Ubuntu (as I said, I'm on Debian). I see now: Ubuntu 16.04 is still ~1 year away from getting mesa 13.0. Yikes.

I know it is common to call out Debian for having outdated pacakges. However, since I moved from Ubuntu 14.04 to Debian camp (when Jessie came out), my experience has been exactly the opposite: I can (more or less easily) get a more current software stack on Debian stable than on Ubuntu LTS.

I know this does not hold true for all packages. Anyway, next year Debian 9 is coming out and it will definitely have more up-to-date packages than Ubuntu LTS. Until 18.04 comes out and so on.
On average, Ubuntu LTS is "newer" than Debian Stable only half of the time. I'll take Debian Stable over Ubuntu LTS anytime. Your mileage may vary .
And before "someone" tells us that Debian testing is amazing, yes, we all know the drill.

In any case, I still highly respect people on rolling-release distros; I haven't found the time to look into moving to such a scheme yet. I'm sure I'll love it when I do, some day.

[SaucyJack]

You are brain dead for not reading any of the previous posts of the issues of updating Mesa without considering the side effects.

This is a great reason for Snaps, uncouple dependency hell and just let users USE their computer!

I did exactly that, and I even commented on it. So I guess you're the brain dead one for not reading the previous posts? There are no side effects outside of matching llvm and mesa. Snaps will lead to bloated systems with slow loading times like WIndows. Game devs who don't like to maintain their software will benefit without users needing to work around the Steam runtime BS.

[SaucyJack]

You are brain dead for not reading any of the previous posts of the issues of updating Mesa without considering the side effects.

This is a great reason for Snaps, uncouple dependency hell and just let users USE their computer!

And holy crap guy, if it will really cause all of these 'issues', are you saying the Ubuntu devs are so incompetent that they can't update a handful of packages every couple of weeks?

[kaprikawn]

I wonder how many Ubuntu users have an AMD card and are using the OSS driver. I can't see it myself, but the general consensus is that Ubuntu is the most used distro so maybe there is a userbase big enough to warrant some action on this front.

Anyway, my take away from this article is that Feral does care quite a bit about the mesa drivers. They get a lot of flack when they release only supporting the Nvidia blob, but I am sure that they only do that because it's the only viable path for them, and they would support the OSS drivers if they could. I applaud their efforts.

[eydee]

I wonder how many Ubuntu users have an AMD card and are using the OSS driver.

Lots of AMD users. Don't forget, that the closed AMD driver only supports a very small subset of cards currently being used.

[zoomblab]

The problem is the idea that you have to updrade the OS to get updated drivers. IMO the development and distribution of drivers should be a responsibility of the hardware vendors. It doesn't matter whether it is an open source or closed source driver. I should be able to go to the vendor's site and download a certified driver package.

[droste]

The problem is the idea that you have to updrade the OS to get updated drivers. IMO the development and distribution of drivers should be a responsibility of the hardware vendors. It doesn't matter whether it is an open source or closed source driver. I should be able to go to the vendor's site and download a certified driver package.

Well as far as I know you already can do that for Intel, AMD and Nvidia at least. How does this solve the problem with getting recent mesa?

[lejeczek]

I may later need to apologize for I haven't read all that news related news - but (is it possible that?) little fockers @Feral just want to sell more games without really getting into the true spirit of open source. Why would they not put (ideally a new practitioner) MESA developer (or two) on their payroll and help that thing get done? Or better do it themselves? Or together with remaining game studios set up yum/dnf/apt/deb repos where EVERYBODY could get that perfect MESA then enjoy all those games? What they are waiting for?
I wish us and them they do it (some day?). Na zdrowie.

[kaprikawn]

The problem is the idea that you have to updrade the OS to get updated drivers. IMO the development and distribution of drivers should be a responsibility of the hardware vendors. It doesn't matter whether it is an open source or closed source driver. I should be able to go to the vendor's site and download a certified driver package.

The issue with that is the driver isn't self-contained, if it was I'm sure it would be that easy. As has already been pointed out on this thread, later versions of mesa have a myriad of dependencies such as LLVM. Updating the driver isn't really the issue, updating the dependencies without impacting the stability of the rest of the system is the problem.