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.

Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      73·
      1 year ago

      What makes you say Intel sucks? The A730M should be somewhere between an RTX 3060 and 3070 but with 12GB of VRAM. From my experience with Intel iGPUs, the software experience is very nice, so I just expect the same thing but with faster performance.

      I’ve tried an A730M laptop last year when they were new, and the drivers worked fine, everything was working out of the box. The only issue was that performance was not stable and power usage was high, but I’m assuming performance will only have improved with 12 months of driver engineering from Intel.

        • worldofgeese@lemmy.world
          41·
          1 year ago

          The Intel discrete cards are fantastic value for money. There’s plenty of folks on the internet who can attest to this. Intel’s support story in general (so not just graphics cards) on Linux has been nothing less than sterling. If you’re using any Linux kernel you can expect Intel stuff to just work. It’s been this way for at least a decade.

            • LeFantome@programming.dev
              31·
              1 year ago

              When is the last time you tried Intel hardware and with what software? I ask because your links do not really tell the same story as your post.

              The first link says that Mesa got “more Intel optimizations”. That sounds like a good thing. It basically says the same thing about AMD and NVIDIA. The only GPU “crash” that was addressed was for AMD which is widely regarded as the best option for Linux. I would not read that article and come away with any concerns about Intel.

              The second link says that kernel 6.2 added “full Intel support”. We are now in kernel 6.7. I use a rolling release and how a much newer kernel than 6.2. A brief Google leads me to believe that 6.5 ships with both Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39.

              I have not used these cards myself so I do it know but others have said the experience was decent now. The OP does not seem that demanding. If it ok now and actively improving, he may be quite happy. It sounds better than nouveau for sure. Is it really as bad as you say?

    • TWeaKEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Don’t forget about NVidia bribing game developers to use their platform, which ends up leaving AMD with performance deficits that should have never existed based on the specs on paper.

      My current PC has an AMD GPU, before that I had NVidia. My current GPU is more than twice as powerful as my old one, yet in many games my new PC has worse jagged edges than my old one did.

        • TWeaKEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Agreed. NVidia directly facilitated the 2020 scalping, for one, driving GPU prices up to obscene levels.