For those who regularly play with Linux, especially doing any kind of GPU mining, you've run into the problem with NVIDIA drivers not working as expected. It's been a known problem, you have to download the proprietary NVIDIA driver that works after a bit of experimentation, or try your luck with the shareware Xorg version that provides poor performance.

Finally, Canonical announced today they will be packaging NVIDIA CUDA as standard with their Ubuntu platform. Not only is this a huge leap in GPU stability, it's also good news for those who struggle with manual driver updates and finding the right mix of commands to get things to work. 

Mind you, undertanding how to make changes to your Linux system via the command line interface (CLI) has always been an informal rite of passage for Linux users. GUI OS distributions like Ubuntu has made things a lot easier than the early Red Hat days, but Linux still has a bit of a learning curve on things like video card swapouts that don't follow a simple plug-and-play approach. With the Canonical CUDA change, this makes things a lot easier for newbies to cross-over, especially at a time when Microsoft Windows continues to have terminal hiccups and update failures literally every month. It's high time for a viable substitute to Windows and Mac, and Linux distributions are filling the gap. This will also contribute to gaming platforms considering Linux users more and more, especially with the easier GPU installations and ready-to-go fans in the Linux-sphere. Steam has already seen this uptick with Linux-friendly games continuing to increase in number.

Ideally, the change should be seamless and barely noticed by those who don't delve deep into the innards of the Linux OS. But it's also a time saver for those of us who know the pain of having to load drivers, update, load again, update, replace libraries, update until things are working right.