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).
Desktop replacement gaming laptops are a mistake. You can buy a normal laptop and the parts to build a gaming desktop for the same price and the laptop will be much more practical to carry around while the desktop will perform better and last longer.
But desktop builds won't use less electricity. I use a desktop replacement gaming laptop at home, without taking it anywhere, because it consumes less power
Not necessarily. Sure it doesn't perform as well as a high-end crypto miner, but it performs better than a lot of desktop PCs that use way more power than it.
I mean that's fine if that's your opinion. But while they may be a mistake for you, I've found them to be a great compromise and enjoyed several of them for the past 10 years.
I have a normal laptop, a ThinkPad X1 Nano, which I love. I also have a desktop with an RX 6800, but I can only use that in my office, a cramped space which has poor Internet and is in an inconvenient spot in our house.
I'm looking for something that I can keep in the living room, and set up on our living room table to play some games with friends. I've had that desktop for almost 3 years and yet I've done most of my gaming since I had it on a 2013 Alienware laptop with an upgraded MXM graphics card.
Different solutions for different people.
Not an option, there's no room in our living room to put a desktop and monitor permanently.
DONT get an nvidia GPU.
It works but its a nightmare sometimes. The drivers are still bad. Dont't.
-nvidia user
I REGRET buying an nvidia adapter when I had the opportunity to buy an AMD/Radeon adapter.
During the pandemic, I purchased an GeForce GTX 1650. It's an older, Turing hardware-based card, so you'd think the driver support would be pretty mature, right? It has been NOTHING but problems.
On nouveau, it's stable, but 3d acceleration just doesn't work right. Under the nvidia open source driver, it corrupts the screen after boot and locks up entirely second later. Under the proprietary driver, it freezes on boot a good amount of the time.
Now, once I get it booted, it's solid as a rock. I've gotta crank the engine over five or six times every time I DO boot, though. If I had it to do over again, I'd definitely have stuck with AMD.
Linux noob here. Why do people refuse to use the proprietary driver? I did not had any seriousl issue with my 2080ti on Nobara. I can game and edit videos with better performances than in windows with same pc
I have had so many issues with Nvidia drivers, especially on laptops with Optimus. Black screens after booting, random breakage when updating, having to fuck around with OpenGL libraries all the time when you have integrated Intel graphics and Nvidia graphics on the same system. It's just a pain for me on laptops.
Wouldn't be such a big issue on a desktop, but I've had a work-provided workstation with an Nvidia and 99% of the time if something broke on that machine, it was because Nvidia wasn't compatible with some updated kernel or libraries.
Intel and AMD have both provided us with a painless driver experience that just works out of the box all the time and is integrated in all the open source things (mainly the Linux kernel and the Mesa libraries for OpenGL & Vulkan). With Nvidia, you need to throw all that out and use their proprietary blobs for OpenGL and Vulkan.
Also, I just think Nvidia is a scumbag company, trying to force single-vendor proprietary solutions on the market by abusing their dominant position (pushing CUDA while refusing to implement any new OpenCL version for over a decade, so software vendors couldn't just pick a competitive open alternative is one example, the original G-Sync is another). I prefer not to give them any money if I can help it.
A few reasons:
- There is a strong desire to see if there is secret sauce in the driver that makes their cards so darn performant. Could it be applied to other video drivers?
- To audit for vulnerabilities and fix them.
- To allow the driver to use some kernel internals that the kernel developers keep trying to wall proprietary drivers off from.
- Ideology
- Community might be able to hack it to work better with Wayland, since the Wayland team has no interest in extending any kind of support to proprietary driver driving GPU's... despite x11 working just fine forever. ... see Ideology.
Often times it doesn't install or they insist on using free software (read: free as in free speech)
it's not there yet but in a few years from now there is hope, a vulkan driver is in the work and the nvidia signed firmware would allow power management for newer gpu, but it's not ready yet...
What makes you say Intel sucks? The A730M should be somewhere between an RTX 3060 and 3070 but with 12GB of VRAM. From my experience with Intel iGPUs, the software experience is very nice, so I just expect the same thing but with faster performance.
I've tried an A730M laptop last year when they were new, and the drivers worked fine, everything was working out of the box. The only issue was that performance was not stable and power usage was high, but I'm assuming performance will only have improved with 12 months of driver engineering from Intel.
