14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu developers are finally considering making some sort of changes that would allow users of their operating system - especially Nvidia fans - to get access to the latest drivers.
As any Ubuntu user knows, the current Nvidia drivers available in the official repositories are actually quite old. It takes a lot of time for any driver to land in the repos, but there is a good reason for that. Canonical doesn't have the manpower to test and clear each new proprietary driver release for Nvidia or AMD. It's left to the community to do this, and they've actually done a pretty good job.
It might sound like a trivial matter, but it's not. Both Nvidia and AMD have started to push more updates out the door (Nvidia leads in this regard), and maintainers don't have the time to test them all. This means that users who are only using the official repos get stuck with very old, albeit trustworthy drivers. They get the job done, but they don't usually have support for very new hardware, not to mention that they are not very good for gaming purposes.
Killing orcs at low framerates
The problem was finally discussed in a more official capacity after Canonical's Jorge O. Castro mentioned about the problem he had with Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in Ubuntu. He wanted more up-to-date drivers, but the ones in the repositories were not up to par. He found out that there were some guys in the community, Michael Marley and Jason DeRose, who maintained a couple of third-party repositories for Nvidia drivers, so he formulated a plan.
"Let's do a 'blessed' PPA with the latest drivers, so that people can just get those drivers without resorting to xorg-edgers and bleeding. This PPA can have a 'give be the latest bling' section, which is basically automated builds of the latest drivers; and a 'stable' section that is basically a few days behind for people who want the latest, but don't want to be beta testers. Lets work to ensure that there's a nice way to get back to the stable drivers in distro and that for users opting in won't be stuck in a weird broken state," said Jorge on the mailing list,
Things are more complicated than this. If they do decide to make this happen, they also have to put in place a mechanism that allows users to return to a previous state if one of the new Nvidia drivers messes up the system. It will take some work, but it will be worth it.
As you can imagine, the switch to Snappy packages will complicate matters a little bit, but developers will have to cross that bridge when they come to it.