Graphics drivers
Open source drivers have come a long way, but hardcore gamers with new Nvidia cards will want to install the proprietary versions.
Many people use Ubuntu as a gaming platform, and with good reason – besides SteamOS it’s where most of the Linux testing takes place. In fact, Steam’s (ageing) runtime is based on old Ubuntu libraries. It’s easy to install Steam on Ubuntu – just enable the Multiverse repository from the Software&Updates application (type soft into the Dash and you’ll find it), and then it’s available either from the UbuntuSoftware application or via a good old fashioned: $ sudo apt-get install steam
The package that gets installed this way is just a sort of bootstrap installer that downloads and installs the Steam client into your home directory. In this way Steam takes care of its updates outside of the package manager, and for the most part does a good job of not breaking itself. If you’re going to be playing graphically intensive games, or even graphically moderate games, and you have a discrete graphics card then you may wish to install proprietary graphics drivers. More specifically, if you have an Nvidia card then you probably will, and if you have an newer AMD card you probably won’t.
Thanks to the new AMDGPU driver framework, open source support for newer (we’ll clarify this in a moment) AMD cards is actually pretty good. A proprietary driver, AMDGPUPRO is available, but this is intended for industry-type OpenCL workloads rather than boosting gaming performance. Initially, the new driver only supported the “Volcanic Islands” and later cards (the Rx 200 series, introduced in late 2013, and newer), but with Kernel 4.10 support now goes back to the Southern and Sea Islands cards (HD7000 and HD8000). The older ATI proprietary driver known as Fglrx is no longer maintained, and doesn’t work with newer versions of X anyway, so unless you like archaic software stack-related masochism this should be avoided. Either buy a newer graphics card or stick with the older, libre radeon driver.
Cards using the Nvidia Maxwell (GTX900) and Pascal (GTX1000) architectures really need the proprietary driver to unleash their not inconsiderable gaming potential. This can be installed from the Additional Drivers tab in the Software& Updates utility. But since these are not updated as frequently as Nvidia release new drivers, you may prefer to use the new graphics-drivers PPA. Historically unsuspecting users have got themselves into all kinds of driver hell by downloading the binaries directly from Nvidia’s website, used a combination of experimental PPAs, copied and pasted instructions from Reddit, or all of the above. The graphics-drivers PPA aims to be a one stop shop for people who are willing to risk slightly more unstable drivers at the cost of newer features. While the drivers from this PPA may occasionally exhibit peculiar or crashy behaviour, they should not lead to unbootable machinery (failsafe boot is your friend–Ed) or data loss.
To use the newer drivers is a straightforward matter of: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nvidia-378
Of course, there are plenty of FOSS games available in the repos if proprietary software gives you the heeby-jeebies.