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 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!