Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Bryan Quigley]

>- Let's not break distro, SRUs and existing distro policies exist for
>a reason; breaking my dad's computer isn't worth it, so ....

>- 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 add a hook to the graphical driver installer for "Pure upstream
> nvidia driver", which would enable this PPA. (Actually the entire
> wording of the drivers in that capplet is horrible, but let's save
> that for another day).

I don't think we can save that for another day.  There are already
more choices in the drivers applet then the average user knows what to
do with.  - And having the official drivers applet call a PPA doesn't
seem like it would pass distro policies..
Why would the average user not choose -  "Pure upstream nvidia
driver"? It has a higher number after all *and* generally should give
users the best experience.

I'd propose that we just give users 3 visible options for every modern card:
"Latest Stable Nvidia Driver (proprietary, tested)"  - We don't have
to release this same day..2 week lag time seems fine, we would need to
get a MRE for this I think
"Previous Stable Nvidia Driver Series (proprietary, tested, if you
have trouble with Latest) -  Should stay on the same series, basically
like nvidia-346-updates now.
"Nouveau drivers, (open source, tested, may have limited 3d acceleration)

For non-modern cards it becomes easier, as you only need to offer the
last series that supported that card.

I believe the average user would be better suited with the latest
stable then the previous series.  Obviously we'd have to have a good
test plan.  I wonder if it's

>> One last thing but aside from the topic slightly, the Steam package in
>> Ubuntu is semi-broken for certain systems because the installer doesn't have
>> the newest Steam runtime so it just straight up breaks on 15.04.
>
> I have found that in general when there's a new HWE release that Steam
> is uninstallable for a certain period of time, but have not had a
> chance to investigate this other than when I see people complaining
> about it on reddit or whatever. Maybe it might be a good idea to put
> steam on the list of things that get tested as part of the HWE
> process? It might be useful if people gathered a list of bug reports
> around this if anyone out there is reading this and knows more about
> it.

Agreed, I know of at least 2 people who couldn't get Steam installed
in Ubuntu.  I determined HWE was the culprit after the fact, but they
had already moved on.
A few example bugs:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3728,
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3730

It sounds like getting a bunch of gaming stakeholders in the same
(virtual) room might help let us get good next steps on this.
Thoughts?

Thanks!
Bryan