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 have a laptop with i7-8th generation and Nvidia 1050ti with Linux Mint. It works flawlessly out of the box
I’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.
It was a right pain in the ass to make Arch work with my setup (GTX 1650 ti as dGPU) as only the dGPU has HDMI for an external monitor connected to it. I vaguely remember fiddling with reverse PRIME and then generating xorg conf file using nvidia’s tools. (Yeah, still using X11)
I’ve been maining Linux for a couple years now on Nvidia and it’s… awesome. It is not the nightmare it used to be, assuming you use the Nvidia drivers. I’ve not found anything in my Steam library I can’t run. Same with Heroic.
I prefer CachyOS but Bazzite I’ve heard good things about as well. I’ve successfully used Fedora and a handful of others also (but I refuse to try Ubuntu - not a fan), so, pick your flavor and try it out.
Now it’s to the point where I rarely have to visit protonDB… most games just work (I use cachyos’ proton build as my default).
Give it a shot. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
My friend has been pushing Bazzite on me since I told her about my plan. She says, quote “Yeah you can make the setup work on any distro of course but you have to set it up, Bazzite just does it all for you”
It’s not a nightmare, but I’ll still go with AMD next time. I think NVIDIA does a really poor job with drivers still. I keep having sleep issues.
No.
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.
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.
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
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.
What is this bullshit? You say you use CachyOS on your current machineS (plural) and then post like you haven’t touched Linux in a decade? You seriously ask if Linux would run on intel?!?!? Can’t google laptop amd gpu? I just did and got 5 lines, not models, but entire lines, from different manufacturers.
Does being an ass to strangers give you joy? Does it provide you pleasure? Does it help you get over your trauma, whatever it is?
… Also, clearly you don’t know how to read.
Either way:
- Google search has been utter and absolute garbage since AI Slop took over the world
- If you’d actually read my post you’d know my bugbear is about hybrid NVidia GPUs on laptops. I’d love to get an all-AMD laptop, as both of my machines are desktops built entirely out of AMD hardware, and I know NVidia’s infamy. But those are not available in my country.
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.
Different hardware, same experience.
Intel 14900HX + NVIDIA RTX 4060 (iirc), Windows never touched that laptop. Distrohopped through 3 separate distros (all fo them worked OOTB), landing on CachyOS.
But yeah, if there is an option to go full AMD - it’s just going to be better
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 have an Intel + Nvidia laptop, it works as it should. Is it a recent laptop?
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.
