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.
I installed CacyOS on my MSI laptop with Nvidia m2060 + igpu and Intel CPU a couple of months ago. I can play genres through Steam just fine. It performs better than it did on Windows 11.
I’ll be honest, I was amazed I had no issues getting it running. CachyOS has sone great tools to set things up and their wiki is excellent. I just followed the steps in there to set up GPU switching. I disabled secure boot, since that can get in the way of drivers loading, but they have instructions for that as well.
Wi-Fi worked out of the box. I even have a luks encrypted root.
The main issue I had was MSI specific hardware, like battery charging control, normally managed by the Dragon Center. I found an open source replacement for that.
I can’t speak to the battery performance since I always use it plugged in. It’s a few years old so it’s probably not great anyway.
Your mileage may vary. It’s probably going to be more off a struggle with hardware specific to the model of laptop rather than Nvidia.