With Mesa coming along rather nicely in the latest releases, Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical push out Mesa updates to their official graphics driver PPA to help Feral officially support Mesa in their linux ports.
Edwin, Feral We have been working with the Mesa community to help improve the Mesa drivers so more games can run on AMD and Intel hardware, and in the last year this has started to hit the tipping point and support has become more and more viable when using the very latest drivers.
Part of the problem is that Mesa on Ubuntu is often outdated, meaning if Feral (and other game developers) want to give support for it, there needs to be an easy and tested way to get the latest open source GPU drivers.
Edwin, Feral The biggest issue we have is there is no way for a user to officially download and install the latest stable versions of Mesa. For example because the official Mesa 13.0.1 release isn’t available to install on Ubuntu, you need to compile it yourself.
Adding tested packages to the official PPA would be an ideal solution for now:
Edwin, Feral I’d like to suggest that official Mesa releases are also added to the graphics-drivers PPA using the release information on the mesa.org website: http://www.mesa3d.org/relnotes.html
You can see the full mailing list entry here .
Hopefully this will get sorted, so users on AMD and Intel can get the best gaming experience possible on Ubuntu.
Not everyone is comfortable compiling things, and I agree that users shouldn't be required to go and compile graphics drivers to get stable versions of Mesa. While there are other PPA's around, they usually provide packages from git which can come with all sorts of breakage. This could benefit a lot of people.
Additional note: The less PPA's people have to add, the more secure they may be. It was an issue raised in our IRC that people flock to all sorts of random PPA's (guilty!), so having a trusted one for this would be awesome.