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 don’t know in general, but in my particular case it’s been smoothly sailing. Lenovo Legion (2024 edition), Intel CPU, and nvidia 4060. Linux Mint.
It’s not a nightmare, but I’ll still go with AMD next time. I think NVIDIA does a really poor job with drivers still. I keep having sleep issues.
I have a laptop with i7-8th generation and Nvidia 1050ti with Linux Mint. It works flawlessly out of the box
I’ve been running Mint on a system with an nvidia GPU for almost two years. The only problem I have really had is one particular silly game (Cosmoteer) that takes a bit of massaging to run, every other game works either as well or better than windows. It keeps a gaming computer from 2020 working and playing games in 2026.
No.
I’m running a 13th gen core i9 and an rtx 4070 on my rog zephyrus. It runs CachyOS beautifully.
No complaints for the two-ish years I’ve had it.
been running bazzite and its been great. this is what the info center shows:
Processors: 16 × Intel® Core™ i7-10875H CPU @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.1 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Design
Graphics Processor 2: Intel® UHD GraphicsI’ve been maining Linux for a couple years now on Nvidia and it’s… awesome. It is not the nightmare it used to be, assuming you use the Nvidia drivers. I’ve not found anything in my Steam library I can’t run. Same with Heroic.
I prefer CachyOS but Bazzite I’ve heard good things about as well. I’ve successfully used Fedora and a handful of others also (but I refuse to try Ubuntu - not a fan), so, pick your flavor and try it out.
Now it’s to the point where I rarely have to visit protonDB… most games just work (I use cachyos’ proton build as my default).
Give it a shot. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
My friend has been pushing Bazzite on me since I told her about my plan. She says, quote “Yeah you can make the setup work on any distro of course but you have to set it up, Bazzite just does it all for you”
It was a right pain in the ass to make Arch work with my setup (GTX 1650 ti as dGPU) as only the dGPU has HDMI for an external monitor connected to it. I vaguely remember fiddling with reverse PRIME and then generating xorg conf file using nvidia’s tools. (Yeah, still using X11)
I have an Intel + Nvidia laptop, it works as it should. Is it a recent laptop?
Laptops are still a bit fucky. Manufacturers often put proprietary power savings and performance optimisation functionality that expects Windows install, and Linux can’t emulate properly.
I spent 3 hours getting a laptop to “work”; the quotes meaning it’s very “quirky”. Stuff like, don’t ever close the lid or you’ll have to suffocate restart it, had to turn off all power savings settings, a few things required deep research and
sudo nanoconfig files, etc.It’s ok now and mostly works while plugged in, but be prepared.
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.
i got a used thinkpad with nvidia t1000 about a year ago. i installed kubuntu on it, chose the proprietary driver from the driver manager thingy and rebooted.
i forget the driver is even a thing. it switches to it automatically when i start a game, and it uses intel igpu when on battery. not a single issue yet and I’ve used it almost daily.Use Mint and you’ll be fine.
I have been using NVIDIA under Linux since 2005, then in 2025 I switched to AMD. I have lots more problems with the Radeon, like the driver just crashing, taking the whole X server and all applications with it. That never happened with NVIDIA.
Gaming on a laptop is a path that will lead to failure eventually; get a desktop computer.
Already got one.
The laptop is for when I’m travelling.
Defeatist mindset
More like realistic mindset based on the “been there” factor.
