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Comment by 0xfaded | Hacker News Reader

From the Arch wiki

  Use nvidia-prime to switch between cards. External outputs are connected to the nvidia gpu.

My X1 extreme gen 2 has PRIME, and the experience is miserable. I got so used to everything just working with intel integrated graphics, but I wanted to be able to use cuda on my laptop. With hacks you can get external displays working, but my understanding is that the current solution is to run a second Xserver for the dedicated GPU and blit everything across. The display is too laggy for anything other than a static presentation.

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For your use case the best option is to run video off the intel integrated graphics and leave the DGPU entirely for compute.

That's how I have this very laptop configured, and also how I configured the workstations for the people here using GPUs for DL development (because a composited desktop will get very janky if you try to run it off a GPU currently being brought to its knees by a training process).

For Gen 2? I did try that.

My understanding was that the external outputs were wired to the nvidia card, and therefore I wasn't able to use them without the wacky PRIME setup.

I'm running the Nvidia edition of Pop!_OS on my X1 Extreme Gen 1. I've got 3 external 4k monitors connected to it, in addition to the built-in 4k screen, and it's running perfectly with a minor nitpick that the fans turn on a lot (probably due to scaling). I'm running Pop!_OS exactly for this reason. They've got an Nvidia edition that includes the Nvidia driver and they pre-configure Nvidia Prime for you.

As soon as I see anything nVidia related I know not to waste my time with it. I am not a gamer, I want secure, easily-updatable, stable drivers. That is exactly what you will not get from nVidia. Intel or AMD are the only sane options.

I have the same, and I concur. In the end, I gave up and just kept the GPU on all the time. Now it works great with external displays in Xubuntu 20.04 at the expense of battery life.

yes I have had a similarly difficult time with nvidia graphics on my lenovo laptop. Also, it happened to be vulnerable to the lenovo/superfish malware, so I'm definitely not trying another lenovo computer.

Maybe it might work if you run wayland on the intel chip, and run Xwayland on the nvidia chip? is that even possible to configure xorg.conf on Xwayland?

Have you tried disabling your compositor? My i3+picom was too slow until I killed picom.

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