Well… it seems I was forced to come here for help. As a project I use to make gaming work on my Ubuntu has been side tracked from Ubuntu’s side, not intentionally obviously.
This has been the only kernel that has provided stability for my and for few other computers I maintain, and like the comment says, Ubuntu has dropped something somewhere, and we can’t get Ubuntu specific kernels now.
And yes, by stability I mean gaming on Ubuntu without this kernel, on my Ryzen and my friends intel machines with AMD gpu’s would be constant crashing.
So I wish this project could do something where the stuff was dropped. Having a stable GPU has been essential for gaming on Ubuntu and AMD has always needed the latest stuff to be actually working. Ironically NVIDIA has never been a issue on my Ubuntu install (after finding the perfect ppa)
Without this kernel project from M-Bab i would have probably dropped Ubuntu long time ago.
Imho, the wine ppa is a must.
I tend towards some kind of official gaming repo, to keep the drivers and tools updated and packaged there there but not endanger the upstream stability of the underlying base Ubuntu.
As an FPS gamer, I think GNOME settings should expose the “Flat” acceleration profile under the mouse settings. In a game like Apex Legends the default profile makes aiming feel too sensitive and unwieldy. Flat IMO makes it feel more like what I’m used to when using Windows.
Once upon a time, Ubuntu/Mint gaming wasn’t up to par, but the latest kernels and Mesa have eliminated that. My Linux machines have beaten my Windows machines in response and overall performance since the advances.
PSA Unreal Engine have released pre-built binaries for Unreal Engine 5 for Ubuntu 22.04, you can download the engine here (if you have signed up for an Epic Account), and it makes it very simple to get up and running with the editor now.
Where are we with Gaming on Ubuntu? We mentioned missing apps and parts of the main distro that need to be bleeding edge for a good user experience.
I’d say an official and curated repository on top of the main one might be the way to go here in addition to work with hardware partners on upstream hardware enablement.
Ah, the ol’ gaming on Linux thing. Maybe it’s about time we started considering the possibility of admitting one day that Linux just doesn’t work for gaming. Maybe it just isn’t the right tool for this job, maybe it was designed for something else…
Check the various gaming related talks on the Ubuntu Summit 2023
It works better than ever, we just need a bit more help from Canonical to make it viable by default without too much intervention and knowledge from the user.
One thing that I think would really help gaming on Ubuntu at this point would be to carry the Mutter-VRR patch in 24.04+ to add variable refresh rate support in Gnome/Wayland.
There is obviously an upstream MR to add support, but it’s over 3 years old at this point and is currently locked. There is also a proposed roadmap to add experimental support in Gnome 46 which was promising, but there doesn’t appear to have been any activity in a month and am really dubious at this point that it will make it before feature freeze.
Meanwhile “Mutter-VRR” with the patch been available on Arch (AUR) and Nobara/Fedora (Copr) for a few releases now and reportedly works great. Someone could potentially provide a PPA for Ubuntu of course, but it would be amazing if it was available by default (i.e. installable and/or behind a hidden gsettings flag).
I understand that it takes a resources and commitment to support a downstream patch, but it would really show that Ubuntu is serious about gaming and would hopefully push upstream to finally accept the MR (additional testing/interest). It would really be great to not go through another LTS cycle without VRR support.
