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Is Linux on a laptop with an Intel Processor + an NVidia GPU still the absolute fucking nightmare it was 10 years ago? (pawb.social)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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Title. I remember having a laptop with an intel iGPU and NVidia dGPU back in the day, and trying to use Linux on it was -- Yeah not really a thing. It meant spending a whole day trying to configure the driver, then you could do optirun command, but depending on the application, it didn't matter how hard you tried or how good you smelled, that shit just wouldn't work.

It's been a long long time. Gaming on Linux has gotten better and better, but I've been using AMD stuff exclusively since ~2018

Still, getting a laptop with an AMD dGPU is... Does anyone other than Framework even make them? Either way I tried and couldn't find any to buy in my country at all.

So I'm eyeing a laptop with an NVidia GPU and an Intel processor. .... But it worries me that I would buy it and find Linux doesn't work on it. I categorically refuse to use Windows on a personal machine ever again, so I'll just do without if NVidia+Linux is still as fuckt as it was back in the day.

In my current machines I use CachyOS, but yeah.

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[–] 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

I have an Intel CPU and an Nvidia 2070m running in a laptop. CachyOS installed flawlessly. All I've ever had to do is sometimes select a different proton compatibility layer from the steam drop-down.

I cannot properly express to you how easy and smooth this has been. Smother and easier than any OS I've ever used, and I'm from the pre-HDD era.

I was even able to run two screens at different resolutions without much hassle. Though sometimes if a game was trying to run on the lower resolution monitor in windowed fullscreen, it will run at the higher resolution and get downsampled. The fact that two different resolution screens on an Intel/nvidia laptop works AT ALL though, is unheard of.

I have the most notoriously bad Linux gaming setup, and Cachy got me into new games in under a dozen clicks from a fresh format. Install OS>install steam>install game>play.

This laptop was a gift though. If I were buying, I'd go with a more traditionally Linux supported setup. The compatibility and distro options are way bigger with AMD, and you'll be supporting a company that supports the community.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    Different hardware, same experience.

    Intel 14900HX + NVIDIA RTX 4060 (iirc), Windows never touched that laptop. Distrohopped through 3 separate distros (all fo them worked OOTB), landing on CachyOS.

    But yeah, if there is an option to go full AMD - it's just going to be better

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    Can attest also, I have an Intel i5 and a rtx3050 running cachyos in a Gigabyte laptop and it's flawless. Power saving is that of a gaming laptop, I get 2 hours of charge when not gaming and not on AC, considerably less when gaming performance is required. But I only got slightly longer from windows 10 when I needed that for something, and I stripped that down to the absolute basics. If I right click on a game on Linux I get a pop-up asking about using my discrete gpu, otherwise it assumes. I have used Wayland and Xorg within the last few years, both are fine.

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