14 DAY TRIAL // Collabora's Emil Velikov announced the availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) development snapshot of the upcoming Mesa 17.0.0 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.
The Mesa 17.0.0 RC3 milestone comes two weeks after the release of the second RC build, and it brings numerous improvements across all the supported graphics drivers included in the stack. According to the release notes, a total of 66 changes have been implemented in this third, and probably the last Release Candidate.
"The third release candidate for Mesa 17.0.0 is now available. Note that we have a couple of issues that I'd like to see fixed. If those are [to] be sorted by this Friday the final release will be out, regardless," said Emil Velikov, Software Release Engineer at Collabora, in the mailing list announcement.
Mesa 17.0.0 3D Graphics Library will bring major changes
We already talked here about the upcoming features of the major Mesa 17.0.0 3D Graphics Library release, which include OpenGL 4.5 support for Intel Haswell graphics cards, as well as many other enhancements for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers, which translates into a better gaming experience for Intel and AMD Radeon users.
As Collabora's Emil Velikov noted above, if those last remaining blockers are fixed this week, we should be able to get our hands on the final Mesa 17 packages by the end of the week, and it won't be long until they also land in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux operating systems.
Mesa 17 will be available in the coming weeks in popular rolling distributions like Arch Linux, OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, Solus, and others that offer users up-to-date technologies, but it will take a while until it lands in the Ubuntu repos, which still use Mesa packages from the Mesa 12.0 series.
For now, Ubuntu is still the recommended platform on Steam, along with Valve's SteamOS, so unless Canonical's developers don't keep up with the development of the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, you'll have to rely on third-party PPAs that offer you stable Mesa 17 updates or bleeding-edge daily builds.
Early adopters can download the Mesa 17.0.0 Release Candidate 3 tarball right now from our website if they want to take it for a test drive on their GNU/Linux distributions. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, which shouldn't be installed on a production machine.