• SagXD@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Question: Is buying a Laptop with a Nvidia graphic card is bad idea for Linux(XFCE user)?

    • KISSmyOS@feddit.deOP
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      8 months ago

      Yes, IMO. If you haven’t bought the hardware yet, there’s no reason to subject yourself to the headache of lacking Linux support, instead support companies that value open source.
      AMD and Intel GPU’s simply work out of the box with all features.

      And it’s not like on a laptop you need the highest of high end graphics acceleration anyway.

    • nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 months ago

      I own an Omen 15 inch with 3060. It has some issues but it works fine. However, my next one will definitely be AMD.

      One major issue is that I have to use my desktop manager (mutter, for Gnome on Fedora) with the Nvidia drivers, not the integrated GPU of AMD, otherwise external monitors do not work at all. This is a problem because dedicated GPU cannot go to sleep amd constantly uses at least 15 watts, reducing the battery life.

      Another issue is, a lot of times, my laptop won’t wake up after sleeping. I have checked the logs, and I am 90% sure that it is because I login to my desktop manager using dedicated GPU. If you don’t need an external monitor, or if you have a dedicated mux switch, you should not have to face any of these problems.

      A few minor problems are that I cannot use the official builds with Nvidia drivers, if I want to use secure boot. For secure boot, I have to rely on third party developers for this. An issue I saw sometime ago was, when I used Manjaro, my maximum TDP of the GPU never exceeded 79 watts. When using Fedora, ot goes up to 95 watts. On Windows it used to go upto 100 watts. Also, there are some softwares like keyboard lighting manager, bios updater etc, which work on Windows only, not even on a VM. Also, the fans never exceed 4099 RPM on Linux, whereas on Windows they could go upto 6500. But I have always seen Linux to be 10-20% faster in my Blender render tests.

      I hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to DM.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Most of the serious problems have to do with Wayland, so xfce will be fine. I’m running it on a t480 with a geforce mx150 just fine.

      If it’s a good deal, take it. Even if you do decide to switch ot Wayland at some point, those issues should be mostly fixed soon™