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.
been running bazzite and its been great. this is what the info center shows:
Processors: 16 × Intel® Core™ i7-10875H CPU @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.1 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Design
Graphics Processor 2: Intel® UHD GraphicsI’ve been running Mint on a system with an nvidia GPU for almost two years. The only problem I have really had is one particular silly game (Cosmoteer) that takes a bit of massaging to run, every other game works either as well or better than windows. It keeps a gaming computer from 2020 working and playing games in 2026.
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 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 And it runs fine apart from one of them being out of date of the official drivers.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.
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’m running a 3080 nVidia with an AMD CPU on CachyOS and it has been a lot more stable than Windows 7 or 10 ever was.
I used to BSOD whenever nVidia didn’t like control over the audio changing in Windows, never once happened on Linux.
I have a desktop and laptop that are both Intel and nvidia running bazzite and they’ve been fine.
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.
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.
I think as the end of the day it will depend on your particular hardware and what kind of power saving is built in.
Haven’t tried it since the move to COSMIC, but Pop!OS used to GPU switching in its settings GUI. It worked really well for my nontechnical family member’s laptop that had Intel and Nvidia. Was in the power management controls, IIRC.
It’s not a nightmare unless you want to use steams gaming mode for a HTPC
Been using for some 2~3 years now a Nitro 5 laptop almost always set to the Nvidia GPU. Issues are very rare, and some times compatibility is actually better than with the other GPU, the Intel one. Also worth noting I use Linux Mint though, and been some years since I last tested systems based Arch (btw).
I installed CacyOS on my MSI laptop with Nvidia m2060 + igpu and Intel CPU a couple of months ago. I can play genres through Steam just fine. It performs better than it did on Windows 11.
I’ll be honest, I was amazed I had no issues getting it running. CachyOS has sone great tools to set things up and their wiki is excellent. I just followed the steps in there to set up GPU switching. I disabled secure boot, since that can get in the way of drivers loading, but they have instructions for that as well.
Wi-Fi worked out of the box. I even have a luks encrypted root.
The main issue I had was MSI specific hardware, like battery charging control, normally managed by the Dragon Center. I found an open source replacement for that.
I can’t speak to the battery performance since I always use it plugged in. It’s a few years old so it’s probably not great anyway.
Your mileage may vary. It’s probably going to be more off a struggle with hardware specific to the model of laptop rather than Nvidia.
I have a laptop with i7-8th generation and Nvidia 1050ti with Linux Mint. It works flawlessly out of the box
