This isn't a comment on Allegro itself, but rather on using Allegro with Ubunutu/Xubuntu.

Recently I decided to try Xubuntu. I haven't messed with Xfce for years and Xubuntu just released a new LTS (16.04). Following the instructions on https://wiki.allegro.cc I used the official Ubuntu allegro ppas.

Then, after everything was working, I did a clean compile of a game I've been working on. The game would crash if al_draw_filled_circle was given a radius of less than zero. It also crashed on any call to al_calculate_spline.

I'm still not sure why. Just on a whim I compiled Allegro from scratch and installed it instead, and the crashes went away. Stable as a table. If I ever try one of the buntu's again, I'll probably just compile from git in the first place.

I quit using Xubuntu and went back to my old trusty Arch. The official Allegro packages for Arch work great.

Ubuntu is fine. That has nothing to do with package maintainers not keeping up with new versions for a little known library.

I always get the newest version from git. It's so easy to simply configure, cmake ..., and make, make install and done. It's only annoying if I need profiling or debug options and I have to remember/lookup how the hell to specify flags to cmake.

I've used Linux Mint, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu (across multiple versions), and they all run fine. Actually, mint was a PITA with that LXDX window manager back when I was in college. But it's gotten better (or hell, just don't use LXDE.) I've even "upgraded" Linux Mint into Ubuntu by manually changing the distro name and repos and simply telling it to update-distro. It had no idea. I got a new window manager, kernel, and packages. Try that with Windows 8 to 10, and you'll end up with an unrecoverable black screen on boot. (POS Microsoft... literally hundreds of hours of my life dealing with their crap failing to "auto" install or "auto" update.)

Man, I'll never forget the old days and I installed Gentoo. I had to PRINT THE MANUAL/WEBPAGE because I couldn't be "online" and install at the same time with only one computer with a modem. But all that work, trying to manually splice configuration options to use the "maximum power" of my ... AMD K2, and once I finally get it to boot to a Window manager I'm like... "so... it's... just Ubuntu, but with a hundred hours of manual labor and days of compile time?" Never. Again.

You can probably use our PPA, it'll have up-to-date versions: https://wiki.allegro.cc/index.php?title=Install_Allegro_from_Ubuntu_PPAs