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).

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.