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.
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.