Title. I remember having a laptop with an intel iGPU and NVidia dGPU back in the day, and trying to use Linux on it was – Yeah not really a thing. It meant spending a whole day trying to configure the driver, then you could do optirun command, but depending on the application, it didn’t matter how hard you tried or how good you smelled, that shit just wouldn’t work.
It’s been a long long time. Gaming on Linux has gotten better and better, but I’ve been using AMD stuff exclusively since ~2018
Still, getting a laptop with an AMD dGPU is… Does anyone other than Framework even make them? Either way I tried and couldn’t find any to buy in my country at all.
So I’m eyeing a laptop with an NVidia GPU and an Intel processor. … But it worries me that I would buy it and find Linux doesn’t work on it. I categorically refuse to use Windows on a personal machine ever again, so I’ll just do without if NVidia+Linux is still as fuckt as it was back in the day.
In my current machines I use CachyOS, but yeah.
I’m running a 13th gen core i9 and an rtx 4070 on my rog zephyrus. It runs CachyOS beautifully.
No complaints for the two-ish years I’ve had it.
The only issue of note is the binary blob, and NVIDIA’s refusal to digitally sign the driver. Thus if you have Secure Boot enabled, you need to take the added steps to resign your drivers every system update, which is a pain, or disable secure boot, which may lock you out of some future stream games.
which may lock you out of some future stream games
Don’t those that require Secure Boot use Kernel Anticheat? You’ll be locked out of them on Linux anyway
Nah, it is all transparent for me. I don’t decide to run something with the dedicated graphics, it just runs as needed it seems. Maybe I have it misconfigured and it is using the dedicated graphics all the time, I’m not sure, but it works fairly well given the hardware it has.
Lol, I don’t know. I purposely bought AMD / Radeon because I heard I didn’t have to load no dumb proprietary binary blob. It’s been good. Just works.
I can’t answer the laptop issue specifically. I have two desktops with Nvidia in it. And it runs fine apart from one of them being out of date of the official drivers. It’s not nearly the hassle it was a decade ago. AMD is always easier generally. But these days Nvidia is pretty stable as well. Especially if you have a modern 20+ series card supported by their current drivers
What made Laptops hard was the whole “two GPUs, and the dGPU switches off to save battery” thing that required the installation of a specific daemon (I think it was called bumblebee or something?) and running games with a specific command to make it happen.
The laptop I was eyeing has a low-end 50 series card.
Yeah therev was some version of it called Optimus as well I think. I installed kinoite on my old xps9570 and handed it to my brother and he’s been gaming on it so the dedicated card surely works. Can’t remember exactly what I did but I think I had to start steam with a specific param or something.
Sorry I can’t be of more help.
I second that Optimus sucks a bit still. That said, I have an older laptop with a 1060 mobile and that one runs smooth af.
For like 80% of the hardware I would assume things work without much hassle.
For the 20% there are more or less reliable workarounds.
But the only thing you need to know: these 10 years Linux’ drivers issues really have improved in a major way. If you ask whether it’s worth it to try again, I would say yes. Not a guarantee but a new roll of the dice.
Interesting. Today I learned. The last new laptop I bought for myself was in the late 90s at the local micro center. Sporting an AMD k6-2. My current one has an AMD iGPU. I’ll have to keep this in mind if I ever get lucky enough to find a good deal on a used laptop with a dedicated or discreet GPU.
It still has its problems but is loads better than what it used to be, less issues with swapping the GPU for intensive applications
Have an i7+4060 laptop, main issue I faced was the thermal throttling because these components get hot fast. NVIDIAs poor drivers really limit your ability to underclock and Intels load line calibration was all over the place for the cpu series.
Make sure you can get the fan controllers working properly, I had to implement the EC firmware for my laptop to get it running properly - something worth checking before buying
I have hardware is the generation you’re thinking of. A T480 with intel and an Nvidia mx150. There’s been a few options, but at the end of the day those Nvidia drivers are the weak spot.
I’ve been running the intel chip exclusively for at least a couple of years. I don’t do gaming and that mx150 is lacking by modern standards. I use primecontrol to toggle between the integrated/dedicated/Optimus modes.
It was doomed from the start. The intel chip is the one driving the screen, so whatever the mx150 does need to be copied over to that framebuffer on an already saturated bus.
I have an Intel CPU and an Nvidia 2070m running in a laptop. CachyOS installed flawlessly. All I’ve ever had to do is sometimes select a different proton compatibility layer from the steam drop-down.
I cannot properly express to you how easy and smooth this has been. Smother and easier than any OS I’ve ever used, and I’m from the pre-HDD era.
I was even able to run two screens at different resolutions without much hassle. Though sometimes if a game was trying to run on the lower resolution monitor in windowed fullscreen, it will run at the higher resolution and get downsampled. The fact that two different resolution screens on an Intel/nvidia laptop works AT ALL though, is unheard of.
I have the most notoriously bad Linux gaming setup, and Cachy got me into new games in under a dozen clicks from a fresh format. Install OS>install steam>install game>play.
This laptop was a gift though. If I were buying, I’d go with a more traditionally Linux supported setup. The compatibility and distro options are way bigger with AMD, and you’ll be supporting a company that supports the community.
Can attest also, I have an Intel i5 and a rtx3050 running cachyos in a Gigabyte laptop and it’s flawless. Power saving is that of a gaming laptop, I get 2 hours of charge when not gaming and not on AC, considerably less when gaming performance is required. But I only got slightly longer from windows 10 when I needed that for something, and I stripped that down to the absolute basics. If I right click on a game on Linux I get a pop-up asking about using my discrete gpu, otherwise it assumes. I have used Wayland and Xorg within the last few years, both are fine.
I am running a System76 Oryx Pro with a Nvidia Optimus(hybrid GPU) chip set and an Intel CPU. I would be lying if I said there were no problems but things have been incredibly stable on the latest drivers. I am not on an Arch based Distro so I can’t speak to that, but most issues I have had have been solved with a bit of tinkering.
My gaming laptop is running fine with Bazzite though I forget what the cpu is.
Jank old laptop with an mx150 discrete and Intel cpu/GPU running fine on Kubuntu but haven’t tried to game or do anything demanding with it. Running better than win11 tho.
I set up my old ASUS dinosaur with NixOS a couple years back. It has an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU (it’s a 2012-2013 model ROG laptop that my ex abandoned). I don’t know how other Linux distros would play, just due to the stuff I hear about the battles between dedicated and internal graphics, but NixOS let’s me just declare the GPU I want running 100% of the time, so that was an easy fix for me.
It’s so old it has to use Nouveau drivers. It doesn’t game all that well (at least not with Steam), even though it was a monster laptop back in it’s day. I tried to play Moonring through Steam, which is just an indie, pixel-graphic roguelike and it was choppy af. Tales of Maj’eyal wouldn’t run at all. However, the Nix packages for Pixel Dungeon and it’s derivatives ran fine. I haven’t taken the time to troubleshoot Steam yet, though.
You could backup your stuff, throw a few distro ISOs you’re interested in alongside a Windows ISO on Ventoy, and just give it a whirl. Worse comes to worse it just doesn’t work and you already have Windows ready to reinstall. Alternatively, it could work with some issues you’d have to troubleshoot, or best case it could just work.
I am running an i5 and a GTX 3050 with 32GB of ram on CachyOS on an HP Victus laptop.
I am quite content with how well everything functions. I have found very few issues that don’t have a workaround of some kind, and even those kinds of issues are fewer and further between in the past few months.
Generally it’s fine, but right now, with my laptop, I’m having to use run an older kernel version because the Nvidia drivers haven’t been updated in the Ubuntu repositories. Installing drivers for Nvidia isn’t hard, but it is something you have to elect to do, and it is something that can break. Meanwhile, with AMD GPUs, it generally ‘just works’.
IMO, given two laptops of equal value, I would pick the AMD, but I wouldn’t pick a worse laptop in order to have an AMD card.
Have been maining an Intel +nvidia laptop a couple years now with a few distros and the only issue I have ever had is wake on sleep gremlins. Those are present in all the distros I have tried but it is pretty minor and doesn’t bother me much.
I had to install nbfc for proper fan control, other than that everything is smooth
