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.

  • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
    204·
    1 year ago

    As someone who just had to shell out the money to do a lateral move from an Nvidia 2080 to a RX 6700XT - don’t go with Nvidia if you’re wanting to have a good time.

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      41·
      1 year ago

      That’s what I got from my past experiences as well, but I haven’t owned anything Nvidia since the Pascal (GTX 10x0) era so I wanted to check if anything got better with their open source efforts.

      • interceder270@lemmy.world
        12·
        1 year ago

        As someone with an Nvidia GPU (3060 mobile) with no issues, this is mostly FUD from AMD fanboys.

        Experience > theory, everytime. Especially the theory of strangers on internet forums. :)

        • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, I wish it had just been theory, I wouldn’t blatantly say something like my original comment if it weren’t based off experience. I’ve written numerous comments on my experience with Nvidia + Linux [+ Wayland] - such as this comment, primarily the the second, third, and fourth paragraphs. Sadly I don’t think its possible to “relative” link direct comments, so I’ve just linked my instance instead.

          Since you mentioned it’s a mobile GPU, I’m not sure if perhaps you have also have an internal GPU that is drawing your regular desktop. My friend doesn’t have nearly the same amount of issues that I have with Wayland, because he’s able to drive his desktop with his iGPU and does GPU passthrough to play games through a Windows VM - the 5600X that I have doesn’t include integrated graphics so this was not possible for me.

          Either way, if it works for you then fantastic. It certainly didn’t work for me, and definitely not for a lack of trying.