Mesa 17.0.2 is now available for Ubuntu 16.04.2 and Ubuntu 16.10

The last few days have been quite controversial for Canonical and the Ubuntu developers. The launch of the Final beta of Ubuntu 17.04 has indicated that users of the next version of ubuntu will have MESA 17.0.2 while the older version and the LTS version will not have it. What's more, users have seen that version after version, Ubuntu removed the old but stable versions of MESA.

This causes more gamer Ubuntu users to have problems with certain games or with certain applications.

MESA 17.0.2 is on Ubuntu 16.10 thanks to an Ubuntu developer

However, thanks to Ubuntu developers, MESA 17.0.2 is a reality in old versions of Ubuntu. Many of you will wonder how it is possible.

This is due to the developer Timo Aaltonen that he has inserted into his personal repository MESA 17.0.2 for Ubuntu 16.04.02 and for Ubuntu 16.10, that is, for old versions of Ubuntu. The repository is personal, so Ubuntu users don't have it as standard, but we can easily install it by opening a terminal and typing the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/updates -y
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

After this, the Ubuntu version will be updated with the latest Ubuntu version and we will not need to restart the pc unless we have to restart with a new kernel. Timo Aaltonen indicates that if we have a problem with the version we should indicate it, something that will certainly help old versions of Ubuntu to have the latest version of MESA.

MESA is a set of Open source applications and libraries that allow us to run any video game on Linux without problems and with the same operation and performance as with other operating systems.

Hence, for many it is important to have or not have the latest version of MESA in its distribution. Fortunately the case of Ubuntu is not generalized, there are other distributions that already have the latest version and that they update it monthly.