I’m looking for a machine to run OpenGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Blender. I’m on the precipice of buying an Alienware w/ Ryzen 9 with a Radeon RX6850m. I’ve never needed anything near this level on Linux and I’m scared TBH. I’d much rather get a System76, but the equivalent hw has Nvidia and costs more than twice as much. While skimming for issues with current hardware, I saw something about a Legion laptop that could only use Intel RAID for the file system, and that this was a nightmare with generic distro kernels. What other stuff like this is happening with current laptop hardware?
I can barely manage a Gentoo install by following the handbook, understanding a third of it, and taking a few weeks to get sorted.
I spent all of yesterday afternoon sorting though all of the Linux hardware data in this stable diffusion telemetry: https://vladmandic.github.io/sd-extension-system-info/pages/benchmark.html
That total dataset has just over 5k total entries/699 valid Linux entries not including LSFW. It contains no entries for a Radeon RX6850m. I’m super nervous to buy a laptop that costs as much as my first car. I never want to run Windows again. What resources can I check to boost my confidence that this is going to work on Fedora WS?
If anyone is interested, the SD github dataset has the following numb entries/AMD card model:
- _3 RX 5700 XT /8GB
- _2 RX _580 __ /4GB
- _3 RX _580 __ /8GB
- 15 RX 6600 XT /8GB
- _1 RX 6650 XT /8GB
- 31 RX 6700 XT /12GB
- 10 RX 6750 XT /12GB
- 10 RX 6800 __ /16GB
- 19 RX 6800 XT /16GB
- 15 RX 6900 XT /16GB
- _9 RX 6950 XT /16GB
- _7 RX 7900 XT /20GB
- 39 RX 7900XTX /24GB
- _6 RX VEGA __ /8GB
Other common cards used in Linux and in this dataset are:
NVIDIA
- 39 A100-SXM4 /79GB
- 20 GTX-1070 /8GB
- 11 GTX-1080Ti /11GB
- 13 H100-PCIe /79GB
- 12 RTX-2070 /8GB
- 12 RTX-2080 Ti /22GB
- 31 RTX-3060 /12GB
- 16 RTX-3070 /8GB
- 10 RTX-3080 /10GB
- 39 RTX-3090 /24GB
- 11 RTX-3090 Ti /24GB
- 10 RTX-4070 Ti /12GB
- 87 RTX-4090 /24GB
- 27 RTX-A4000 /16GB
- 15 RTX-A5000 /24GB
TESLA
- 26 T4 /15GB
- 11 V100S-PCIE /32GB
I recently got an Alienware, and I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy. I got a great deal on it through someone who works at Dell. But it is so controlling. I changed the fans because the ones that came with it were too loud, and now it always complains at boot that the fans are not working properly, and I need to click “ok” for it to boot.
It also has proprietary hardware in it. The liquid cooler and PSU are so custom that they wouldn’t fit in any other chassis, and I doubt I could get another PSU to fit in this chassis. Oh, and the motherboard is an L shape, so the I/Os wouldn’t line up with the window if I wanted to swap it out. All the software that came with it was so garbage that I originally re-installed windows. But there was still issues like it constantly rebooting. So I eventually just installed Linux and haven’t looked back.
Hi there, fellow Alienware owner. May I ask which model you own and which linux distro you ended up installing? I’m terrified of making the jump for several reasons but graphics driver issues are high on the list. (I’m with an m15r7)
I have the Aurora R15. I installed Ubuntu. Being that mine is a desktop, it doesn’t have the graphics driver issues that you are probably thinking of.
I used to have a work laptop (a Dell as well, IIRC, but it was years ago) with an Nvidia graphics card that I installed Ubuntu on, and it had tons of graphics driver issues. I think it had something to do with using integrated and discrete graphics together that caused the problem. I had really bad screen tearing, and IIRC, I eventually installed the open source driver to fix that. I might still have the page bookmarked somewhere with what I did to fix the screen tearing. However, that tanked my performance. It was a work laptop, so it wasn’t a huge deal for me. I just didn’t want screen tearing because it irritated me. Oh, and after that, if it ever went to sleep, it would crash on wake like 70% of the time. So I set it to never sleep, even if the button was pressed or the lid was closed.
Yeah, it was nothing but problems. Best I can say is boot from a live USB or possibly even use another SSD you have lying around, but don’t wipe your existing one until you are very sure you don’t want to ever go back.
I see… I presumed you would have a laptop since OP was talking about laptops. Just like you, I’ve installed Linux on another dell laptop some years ago and had a very similar experience with hybrid/Optimus. I’ve heard that drivers for Nvidia and laptops have improved a lot since but I am still not sure it’d work as it should.
Thanks for suggesting the live USB option, I didn’t think of it. I’ll investigate!