AMD video cards will be supported as well

Aug 13, 2015 08:50 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu developers have set up a dedicated PPA for proprietary drivers, and for now, only the Nvidia video cards are supported. This is a great step forward made by Canonical, but a lot more work needs to be done.

It's a well-known fact that Ubuntu repositories have really old drivers. It hasn't been much of an issue because, until a couple of years ago, people didn't really care that much about drivers as long as they worked. Now, each new driver version works a little bit better and that becomes apparent in games. It's easy to see why Ubuntu users wouldn't want to have the latest drivers on their system.

This leaves users with two choices. Either use one of the third-party PPA that's out there and hope for the best or install each driver update manually. The third-party repos are maintained by dedicated members of the community, but they don't have any kind of support from Canonical. Most of the time, it's just one guy testing a driver of a few configuration, at best. The other solution is to install manually the drivers, and if you've already done that one, you probably don't want to do it again.

Ubuntu developers step in

Just a couple of days ago, Canonical's Jorge O. Castro started the discussion about setting up an official repository with the help of Michael Marley and Jason DeRose, who are two of members from the Ubuntu community who have already maintained a couple of repos with Nvidia drivers.

Now, a new PPA has been set up and it should have a more official capacity. Lots of Nvidia drivers have been made available in the PPA. All you have to do is enter a few commands in the terminal:

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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
If you want to get the latest version of the driver, run this command:
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sudo apt-get install nvidia-355
This is just the beginning, and more work need is needed to be done. The developer has promised that a tool with handy GUI is also incoming. It's very likely that AMD video cards will also get supported in the near future.