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.
I don’t know in general, but in my particular case it’s been smoothly sailing. Lenovo Legion (2024 edition), Intel CPU, and nvidia 4060. Linux Mint.
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.
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.
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 And it runs fine apart from one of them being out of date of the official drivers.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.
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.
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.
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 think as the end of the day it will depend on your particular hardware and what kind of power saving is built in.
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.
I have a desktop and laptop that are both Intel and nvidia running bazzite and they’ve been fine.
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.
It’s not a nightmare unless you want to use steams gaming mode for a HTPC
I have an almost 20 year old laptop with an i5 and a 1050ti, installed CachyOS and it just works. Afaik it uses igpu by default, havent tried much yet but i can see that the laptop is pretty silent normally and gamee run well with a command that makes them use dgpu.
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 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
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.
