These days I was wondering what laptop GPU would be the easiest to maintain / simplest to configure from a laptop POV?
Considering NixOS (I see Nix as gentoo++) or arch.
Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?
Would prefer open source but am not Uber passionate (results > means).
Fictional use case is mid tier game development - ray tracing is nice but stability and minimal effort to keep stable while pushing decent amounts shader/polygons is more important vs peak perf/px. No bitbro / artificial guess.
Experiences & recommendos?
The answer is AMD/AMD, regardless of whether you're going for integrated or discreet. Reasons being stability and performance/price ratio. Stability because AMD's open-source drivers are excellent and rarely break with updates (not that it doesn't happen, but the breakage isn't as frequent as nVidia, statistically speaking). Plus, AMD drivers play better with Wayland compared to nVidia (although in saying that, nVidia has made some significant advancements in Wayland support recently, but may still require some custom variable settings/tweaks).
Laptop and GPU don't really belong in the same sentence. There are good ones that are integrated or not. But if you are asking about GPUs it's time to look into a desktop. A laptop will never have a good GPU.
Edit: Saw that you are talking about game development. Yes, it's desktop time. You will need it.
Idk if I agree with that. The one that's in my laptop works pretty well. It's an RTX 3080 Mobile. It's fairly beefy, and I'm able to run AAA games at max graphics settings at 60+ fps. Sure there are crappy laptops with weak GPUs, but I mean gaming laptops exist and work great in my experience.
Well…maybe. I will say what Apple has done is pretty impressive. A desktop has the power supply to drive energy intensive workloads, however I would rather not do that for … game tinkering, at best. Mobility is a virtue.
Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?
I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.
My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.
I have an Asus TUF with an iGPU and a discrete nVidia GPU. I did no configuration whatsoever to get the iGPU to work, and simply use prime-run when I need more GPU power (basically, only for Steam and Kdenlive).
I use Arch btw, on Xorg, with the closed-source nVidia driver (I never tried Wayland on this setup).
Have got an Nvidia quadro in my laptop, Wayland on Nvidia still kinda sucks but if you run the DE on integrated graphics and intensive stuff on the GPU it works a charm
