These days I was wondering what laptop GPU would be the easiest to maintain / simplest to configure from a laptop POV?

Considering NixOS (I see Nix as gentoo++) or arch.

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

Would prefer open source but am not Uber passionate (results > means).

Fictional use case is mid tier game development - ray tracing is nice but stability and minimal effort to keep stable while pushing decent amounts shader/polygons is more important vs peak perf/px. No bitbro / artificial guess.

Experiences & recommendos?

  • excitingburp@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    I recently switched away from the Legion 5 15ARH05: AMD APU+NVIDIA. The thing with laptops is that you are at the mercy of the system integrator. They are able to integrate the GPU in weird ways and often do. For me the external monitor wouldn’t work without the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed. The NVIDIA drivers caused all sorts of problems, from backlight woes to failure to resume from standby (which worked fine without the drivers installed).

    If you do go with an NVIDIA machine, go with one that is built for Linux. I switched to an all AMD (I really don’t want to deal with NVIDIA bullremoved) System76, but I hear their NVIDIA story is pretty good.

    Do not buy a Windows+NVIDIA laptop and put Linux on it - unless you get a glowing recommendation for a specific model.

    You should install the open source System76 modules for the best experience (not required): https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware