14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Timo Aaltonen is back with some great news for Ubuntu Linux gamers, as he's now working on bringing the latest X.Org Server 1.19.2 display server and Mesa 17.0.1 3D Graphics Library to the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release.
In his latest blog post, the developer reveals the fact that the long-anticipated X.Org 1.19 display server is now ready for public testing on a special PPA (Personal Package Archive) for Ubuntu 17.04, along with Mesa 17.0.1, which appears to rest in the proposed repository of the forthcoming distribution at the moment of writing.
"I’ve prepared X server 1.19.2 along with the driver rebuilds for zesty on the staging ppa here: https://launchpad.net/~canonical-x/+archive/ubuntu/x-staging," said Timo Aaltonen, Hardware Enablement, Field Expert Squad Team Lead at Canonical. "It also comes with Mesa 17.0.1 while it’s still stuck in zesty-proposed."
A call for testing
Of course, this is more of a call for testing than an announcement, so don't get too excited. However, it will be a huge achievement for Canonical to ship the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release with an up-to-date graphics stack based on X.Org Server 1.19 and Mesa 17.0, which translates to a major performance gain for your gaming experience.
Therefore, if you want to see Mesa 17 and X.Org Server 1.19 in Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), we recommend that you set up a special partition and test drive the two technologies from the staging PPA linked above. Make sure that you report any issues you might encounter with your graphics cards, especially AMD Radeon and Intel users.
According to Timo Aaltonen, Canonical's plan is to bring both X.Org Server 1.19.2 and Mesa 17.0.1 to the main repos of Ubuntu 17.04 next week, if everything goes well and there aren't any blockers, so fingers crossed for a better gaming experience on Ubuntu. Meanwhile, the Linux 4.10.1 kernel has landed in the Zesty Zapus repos.