+Timo, my tone was one of excitement and not really a rant, so I apologize if I came off as sounding impatient and I can understand the long hours everyone here puts into this and I really do appreciate this and am very grateful.
However, I'm looking at this from a "customer expectations" point of view and not a developer point of view. This applies specifically to sophisticated customers such as gamers, engineers/scientists/developers and power-users who are the most likely candidates to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu on the desktop. From the customer point of view - especially gamers and demanding power users - the driver release cadence is still way too slow and is a valid bug. Sophisticated users need to flexibility to extract the maximum performance and ensure maximum stability for their system especially for mission-critical applications. Whether we like it or not the industry standard that every customer expects is that set by Windows 7/8 and for those systems there are always fresh drivers available within days of release. Anything slower is perceived as being sub-standard. It's not a matter of who's right or who's wrong it's that we need to at least match or even better beat that release cadence. Ideally a Linux distribution should find a way to be ahead of a Windows release cadence. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nvidia-graphics-drivers-304 in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1219908 Title: All nvidia-current and nvidia-updates need repackaging to mirror official Nvidia releases... Status in Nvidia Feature Request and Bug Reporting: New Status in “nvidia-graphics-drivers-304” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in “nvidia-graphics-drivers-319-updates” package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: The official Nvidia long-lived-branch stable driver is now 319.49. That means that the recommended official driver is 319.49 and should be used by all Nvidia users except those using old legacy devices. There are important fixes that are in this driver and the previous 319.17 that affect Chromium browser users especially: + Fixed a memory leak that occurred when destroying a GLX window but not its associated X window. These can crash machines using Nvidia GPU's according to a Chromium- bug http://crbug.com/145600 "NVIDIA linux drivers are unstable when using multiple Open GL contexts and with low memory.:" and if check `about:gpu` you will see this is a major reason most if not all Nvidia GPU's are currently blacklisted. Also, when using Windows 7 I am at liberty to install any driver version I want, keeping my machine up to date with the latest official Nvidia fixes. With Ubuntu I'm stuck with older drivers that affect performance and contain old bugs that have already been fixed. This leads to a lower quality experience than with Windows. Drivers need to be kept current with upstream in my opinion. For the time being I have been cherry-picking *.deb packages from X-Org-Edgers so that I can replicate that Windows experience and it's been working. However, all Ubuntu users should have this experience as well and most do not know how to manually install packages using DPKG so it is out of their reach. The current Nvidia driver versions are as follows: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html Long Lived Branch version: 319.49 <-- `nvidia-current` should be here as stable Short Lived Branch version: 325.15 <-- `nvidia-updates` should be here as unstable Legacy GPU version (304.xx series): 304.108 <-- `nvidia-current-legacy` should be here. This situation has to be solved, Ubuntu cannot be so far behind the curve that it cannot keep Nvidia drivers fresh and in sync with the upstream Nvidia release schedule... To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nvidia/+bug/1219908/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
