I'd like to piggyback here just a bit, and hopefully not offtopic just to share my experience for whatever it's worth.

I've tried many times to get mame installed on my custom built PC from 2012 and failed numerous ways. The PC is AMD processor based and uses a Radeon 7770 GPU, and I can install lr-mame20003 and lr-mame2010 with no problems whatsoever. But when I've tried lr-mame2016, lr-mame, or even mame, I always end up with errors similar to the above and a failure to install.

fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.

I've mostly stuck to Ubuntu 20.04, but once tried 21.04 and ran into the same thing @johnodon mentioned about the qt5 dependency. So today I got hold of a Dell Optiplex 3070 to test. I was able to install lr-mame onUbuntu 20.04.2 on the first attempt. This is Intel CPU based with integrated graphics.

I suspected and am now increasingly convinced that either my AMD CPU or my old Radeon GPU has something to do with being unable to install on my old PC. Unfortunately the logs and error messages don't provide enough clues to fix it in my experience. So when I get around to doing an arcade cabinet build, I will be looking for an Intel based system.

I wonder if there is anyone who can say they have installed newer mame cores on Ubuntu using AMD processors or AMD / Radeon GPUs.