Hi all,
I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.
I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?
The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.
Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).
I’ve had all those issues back in like 2014.
Nvidia Optimus has come a long way on Linux. Manjaro and Mint have utilities to enable it out of the box.
THAT SAID
We still have to prepend all programs we want to use the Nvidia GPU with
prime-run. I’m not sure if mobile AMD users have to do the same, but this is legitimately annoying as hell this many years later and would actually be a good reason to pick AMD over Nvidia.No we don’t. Mesa and the kernel automatically decide to use the dGPU for intensive tasks. It is only on rare ocassions that I have to use the DRI_PRIME=1 to force the use of the dGPU. It has been months since I last did it
Thanks. I’ve been curious about that.
Gonna start sharing it as another reason why I would choose AMD over Nvidia, in addition to the drivers being open source.