14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu will have a dedicated PPA for video drivers, for now only for the Nvidia ones, and third-party developers are already praising the devs for this decision.
One of the issues with Ubuntu is that it has some pretty out-of-date repositories, and they haven't done anything to fix this until now, although they are working on a new type of packages (Snappy) that should end this problem. Until then, Ubuntu users need to rely on third-party repositories to get all the latest apps and drivers. There were already a few repos that had the latest drivers, but it's always good when you find drivers that are at least partially supported by the distro.
A member of the Ubuntu team finally did something about the old drivers that were available in the repositories, and he coopted the help of a couple of members of the community. It's still early work, and there is no word of AMD support, but at least things are no longer stagnating. The arrival of Snappy package will definitely change the landscape, but they are still a couple of years away from being widely adopted.
Community is already reacting to the new PPA
Just setting up a PPA with tested drivers was enough to make the community respond. Many users are now happy to see that they find a reliable and always up-to-date driver resource, but it's also helpful for companies.
System76 and Feral Interaction have already applauded the decision. Systems 76 is a hardware vendor that only sells Ubuntu-powered PCs and laptops, and Feral Interactive is a gaming company specialized in porting games for Linux. Both of them have a lot to gain from driver consistency.
This is what Jason Gerard DeRose from System76 had to say: "I think this is a great idea and am happy to help. I'd love to see the Nvidia driver packaging get more attention, plus when System76 is shipping hardware newer than what is supported by the Nvidia driver in the in the official archive, this is work I'm already doing. So might as well have it more broadly useful, coordinate the effort with others."
If you want to add the new PPA to your system just enter the following commands (only Nvidia drivers for now):
sudo apt-get update