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.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years and I don’t get it either. I don’t know why a vocal minority get so fixated on it. It’s not like it’s the only manufacturer with proprietary drivers. As long as the drivers work and are easy to install I don’t see a problem.

    I’ve used ATI/AMD cards equally over the years and I’ve always ended up having more problems overall with them than with Nvidia cards & drivers. If I were inclined to generalize I could say that open source drivers are apparently lower quality, right? 🙂

    But that would be just as silly as the other way around. I don’t think that open or closed drivers, in itself, automatically says anything about quality.

    If closed source drivers really were a problem then Nvidia wouldn’t be used by 80% of Linux gamers.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s because starting with April 2022 they mixed the AMD chipset from the Deck in with the PC stats. If you go back to March 2022 it’s different.

        • donio@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yep, I realized that as soon as I posted and tried to ninja-delete but too late :)

          If I sum up the numbers from March 2022 it’s 26% AMD and 38% NVIDIA.