Ubuntu Developers Want To Make It Easier To Run The Latest NVIDIA Drivers

Jorge Castro of Canonical has started coordinating some work around providing newer upstream NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers for users, primarily Ubuntu gamers.

After being dissatisfied with the performance of the NVIDIA Linux driver as currently packaged on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, he resorted to using PPAs for getting the newer NVIDIA Linux driver. He's looking to build on that and to do a better job of testing and making available the newer binary blobs.

Jorge is hoping to see improvement to the graphics driver PPAs for providing newer drivers while having some official "blessing" and trying to not disrupt the state of the system. There's also a desire to have a graphical driver installer that's nice for running the latest "pure upstream NVIDIA driver."

Shadow of Mordor issues with old drivers is what motivated Jorge to improve the situation... See our Benchmarking Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor On Linux, Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor Is Easily One Of The Most Demanding Linux Games, and Shadow of Mordor Performance: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux tests.

You can read Castro's proposal in full via this Ubuntu-Desktop thread. So far other developers have also expressed interest in making it easier to get the latest NVIDIA driver on their Ubuntu systems for fixing OpenGL problems and/or improving the performance of the modern games coming over to Linux.

There also appears to be some interest in supporting the AMD Catalyst Linux driver updates in a similar way under Ubuntu.