Games company Feral Interactive’s call for a PPA be set up to offer the latest Stable Mesa drivers on Ubuntu has been semi-answered.

Emphasis on semi, there.

As noted by Gaming on Linux, a new stable Mesa PPA is now available — hurrah — but it is not “official” in the way that the stress-tested Nvidia drivers PPA is — boo.

Nevertheless, Paulo Dias’ Mesa Stable PPA does offer exactly what it says: newer stable Mesa drivers for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10.

In their request Feral reasons: “In the last year [Mesa] has started to hit the tipping point and support has become more and more viable when using the very latest drivers.”

Currently Dias’ PPA hosts Mesa 13.0.2 and LLVM 3.9 (replete with RADV and ANV).

But (there’s always a but) keep in mind that this is a community-run PPA and the drivers aren’t (currently) going through the same sort of testing and quality checks as those in the opt-in Nvidia PPA. There’s also no guarantee that it’ll stay up to date, or work with all sorts of configurations and set-ups.

Add This PPA

[box style=”alert”]Please, please don’t add this PPA idly. If in any doubt, keep out! [/box]

If you’re on Ubuntu you can opt-in to hose your system install the latest stable Mesa drivers by running the following commands in a new Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/pkppa

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Let the process complete fully and then — and only then — reboot your PC. The new drivers should kick in.

If all goes belly up (which it could) you can use the PPA Purge tool to downgrade back to the Ubuntu archive’s older, but better tested, versions.

If you take them for a whirl do report your success in the comments below.