My understanding is that X.Org X server – Nouveau display driver from xserver-org-video-nouveau (open source) is a deprecated graphics driver and will soon lose support as a result of Wayland migration.
I quote Joshua Strobl 07/07/23:
" Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 and will be dropped in “a future major RHEL release”.
Graphics fallback modes are Wayland-friendly now with SimpleDRM enabled since F36.
NVIDIA drivers (since v495~v515) support GBM for Wayland instead of EGLStreams. Wayland is fully supported on current NVIDIA drivers.
This will drastically reduce our support burden and give us the ability to focus on quality for the KDE Plasma stack and continue our feature-forward nature.oshua Strobi:"
My question is when exactly will the Nouveau driver lose support on UB 22.04 LTS?
I have signed up for ESM which tells me that my system is supported in terms of security until 2032. That means nothing if the graphics driver is unsupported in terms of security.
You’ve answered your question: as the name suggests, the ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) allows you to benefit from extended security updates until 2032.
As the “Nouveau” driver is an integral part of the system, it is included in these security updates.
On the other hand, as the name suggests once again, you won’t get any further technical upgrades.
What I don’t quite understand is why you haven’t upgraded to UB 24.04 if you’re not using an NVIDIA driver: this is usually done because the NVIDIA driver specific to the graphics card is no longer available in the repositories of the latest version of the system.
This allows you to extend the life of an ageing computer without having to change the graphics card.
But in your case, given your concerns, you’d be better off upgrading to UB 24.04.
At the same time, I fully understand your position. At first, I myself regretted upgrading to UB 24.04: imperfections and problems suddenly appeared that didn’t exist in the previous version. The Budgie environment is not to blame, the problems come from Ubuntu: a distribution like Zorin 17, which is still based on Ubuntu 22.04, confirms this.
I even thought that Ubuntu 24.04 was poorly finished and had been released too early. This is the problem with distributions that follow a fixed release model. It also happens with Debian, which has a slower pace.