Ubuntu Fixes Old NVIDIA Wayland Support For GNOME, Hiring More Desktop Engineers

There are a few interesting bits of information as part of this week's updates from the Ubuntu Desktop Team Integration Squad.

Prominent GNOME developer Daniel Van Vugt at Canonical has continued working on a number of interesting patch series. He continues hacking on the GNOME Mutter triple buffering support that's been carried by Ubuntu/Debian for some time. But it still hasn't landed and even with the latest fixes, he's still going through code review. Given we're just a few weeks out from the GNOME 47 stable release and past the various freezes, it looks very unlikely that the triple buffering support will be upstreamed for GNOME 47. The long journey continues.

One GNOME merge request from Van Vugt that did get upstreamed this past week is a regression fix to reinstate support for EGLDevice. Mutter's EGLDevice support ended up breaking when KMS thread changes were merged last year. Yes, NVIDIA has since abandoned their EGLDevice/EGLStreams push with their latest modern driver releases, but the end-of-life NVIDIA 470 legacy driver series does continue to depend upon EGLDevice/EGLStreams for Wayland support. Thus the small fix to Mutter was upstreamed for restoring that EGLDevice support to satisfy those running the legacy NVIDIA 470 Linux driver and wanting to enjoy Wayland.

Also worth mentioning from this week's Ubuntu desktop status update is that Canonical is working to hire more desktop software engineers. Van Vugt cited ongoing engineering jobs at Canonical for those interested. Canonical continues hiring from cloud and AI/ML engineers to various desktop roles around working with their OEM partners like Dell, HP, and Lenovo on Ubuntu for pre-load systems.

See this post for the latest Ubuntu desktop updates.