I’m not a Linux expert but I’ve been running Ubuntu (Pop!_OS most recently) for a few years. I recently bought an Intel ARC A770 and have found that Pop!_OS is very resistant to letting me use newer Mesa drivers despite adding a PPA to supposedly do just that. Since using 6 month old drivers on the A770 just isn’t cutting it, I decided to switch to Manjaro which has been mostly positive so far. But there’s unfortunately a bug relating to ARC and Cyberpunk 2077 (phoronix.com|news|Intel-Not-Intel-Cyberpunk-2077) that’s preventing me from playing it at the moment.
Supposedly if I install development drivers I can play with a work around implemented in “Mesa 23.2-devel”. I am wondering if there is a way to have Manjaro use Mesa drivers that are even less stable than what is currently the default without having to compile them myself manually. Failing that, I guess if I’m going to use the A770, I might need to learn how to do that. So if there’s no way to just have Manjaro handle using less stable drivers automatically, can someone point me to a detailed walkthrough on how to compile and install the drivers manually?
As for Intel discontinuing their internally manufactured cards, I mean it’s not great news, but by all accounts Intel still has a new generation of cards coming out next year. They’re probably sitting on a good bit of A770 stock and 3rd party vendors are producing A770s, so they probably don’t need to keep building more units internally since they probably have enough (given the sluggish sales) to carry them through until the next generation release when combined with 3rd party units. As it stands right now, the drivers are in a good enough place that they don’t need to get much better to be usable. I certainly hope that they will continue working on them, and given that I assume the next generation will build on those same drivers I expect that my A770 will continue to be usable for a long time, even if it never quite reaches the potential the hardware has locked inside it. Though I bought the A770 as a “mid-range” card to carry me through until AMD released some mid-range cards for their current generation. That’s what I have been waiting on to start my next PC build. I have plans for an AM5/DDR5 build with a current gen AMD mid-range card in it, but I’m waiting for them to release those since my current machine is perfectly fine as is, aside from the janky drivers on the A770.
Just to follow up, the steps worked. I’m on 23.1.3 now. Thank you very much for the instructions.
(It’s not the 23.2 that is needed for the workaround, but, I can wait a bit and see how long it takes for that to get passed along. It is however a newer version than previously which is a win.)