Ubuntu 16.04 Still Isn't Shipping With VDPAU, VA-API or OpenCL By Default

While playing around with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS this weekend in its current development state, I was a bit surprised to see that this next Ubuntu release still isn't shipping with VDPAU, VA-API, or OpenCL support by default.

Even with VDPAU and VA-API being in quite a mature state for open-source video playback acceleration, the support still isn't shipped by default in Ubuntu 16.04. While the open-source OpenCL state isn't nearly as far as the open-source video acceleration state, progress continues being made there, Intel Beignet is in much better shape than Gallium3D Clover, and applications like LibreOffice and GIMP are beginning to leverage OpenCL for GPGPU computing.

The last I wrote about this was two years ago when Ubuntu didn't want to ship the VDPAU drivers in order to save a few megabytes of disk space.

At least the support can be easily installed via the repositories, albeit isn't an ideal out-of-the-box experience. What do you think of distributions in 2016 still not shipping with VA-API/VDPAU/OpenCL by default? Let us know by commenting on this article in the forums, might make for some interesting discussions.