Adding a hook to ubuntu-drivers GUI for a driver PPA

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hello tech board,

It is my understanding that most of you are either at DebConf or
LinuxConf, so I thought I'd start the conversation via mail, here's
the context: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2015-August/004693.html

A bunch of us have organized and are now publishing the drivers at
ppa:~graphics-driver. While this will help advanced users by
consolidating third party PPAs into one more organized one, it doesn't
so much for the new user who is experiencing this new world of gaming
on Linux. Two out of the three contributors to this PPA are well-known
and trusted Ubuntu developers with years of contributions to Ubuntu.

I wanted to ensure that we got feedback from game developers
themselves, which is why we asked Feral and Aspyr to leave their
feedback directly. The thought is, if we can make Ubuntu rock for
these guys, then the rest of us get the benefit of that work.

I'd like to propose the following:

- An additional entry in the graphics driver dialog that says
something similar to "The latest upstream driver from Nvidia), this
selection would never be the default.
- The user accepts a way to acknowledge that these things are a
community best effort and are provided as-is, with no expectations of
support.

We would then update the PPA according to Nvidia's upstream release
schedule.  I realize that this request is pretty much the antithesis
of everything we know about shipping a well supported desktop
operating system, so I'd like to kick off with some of my reasoning:

- The rate of first class AAA game titles for Linux is increasing, and
a great deal of those games are requiring the latest drivers.
- There is a bunch of things happening in the gaming space, like the
Vulkan API and VR, which will mean that  this space will probably
start to rev faster, not slow down.
- SteamOS is for console OEMs. For desktops and laptops, Valve tells
people to use Ubuntu.
- The demand for these drivers will cause people to do things to get
them, including xorg-edgers, manually installing drivers (which is a
terrible user experience),

Looking forward to the discussions, thanks for your time!

-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://juju.ubuntu.com/ - Automate your Cloud Infrastructure