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Comment by cHaOs667 | Hacker News Reader

Why without an Nvidia GPU? Just go with an XPS 15 or 17 and embrace Nvidia on Linux. I have three developers running Linux on HP zBooks with Nvidia GPUs without any hassle.

You can also buy any newer Thinkpad (my recommendation). They are also available with AMD CPUs.

It's pretty easy to buy Linux laptops these days.

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Everyone in the Linux space, from what I regularly read and hear, says that NVIDIA GPUs are notorious and a bad idea for using Linux. They're saying go with AMD. (As well as Ryzen instead of Intel for CPUs, where possible.) The only open-source nouveau drivers are absolutely terrible, I can attest to that fact myself. There's several benefits to not relying on NVIDIA's proprietary and non-in-built drivers for a decent experience. You'll know this already, depending on how deeply and regularly you use Linux.

I will anecdotally agree; I've been a Linux laptop user for... well, 2 decades maybe? and explicitly choose Dell Mobile Precision and/or IBM/Lenovo T-series laptops with ATI/AMD, dealing with NVIDIA graphics is just a pain in the ass once we passed the GeForce era (ish).

I'd rather just have/use Intel GPU over them as well, I am not a laptop gamer to need anything NVIDIA offers in exchange for the pain in maintenance using out of tree modules to me.

I will anecdotally disagree.

Depending on which distro you use NVIDIA grapics can be quite painless. Using Pop!_OS, I just had to download the correct iso from their downloads page.

I believe most other distros have NVIDIA's drivers in their non FL/OSS repos as well.

Optimus graphics will even work with the most current drivers.

I'll agree here as well. While I'd love to get more AMD centric options without Nvidia - they're not as bad these days as it was years ago. In fact I use an Intel NUC (Skull Canyon) as my daily desktop driver. The kicker is I wanted to do some OpenCV with Nvidia and run the NUC with an eGPU on Linux. I've been doing it for years and it works surprisingly well. It's gotten even better with 'egpu-switcher' [0].

[0] https://github.com/hertg/egpu-switcher

I’m using Pop!Os (preinstalled) with a sys76 laptop. Works great (can even game) battery life is terrible (though it looks fantastic and can drive a 32 inch high dpi external)

I can switch to built in Intel video for better battery but it requires a reboot. I see this as a stopgap. My home machine has an amd video.

It's definitely sub-optimal needing to reboot.

I only need the NVIDIA graphics every so often on my laptop though, so it's fine for me.

On desktop I've had no issues.

This is also the distro my employees are using.

I've used nvidia GPUs on Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers.

In my experience they're largely OK. There are some rough edges - you'll struggle to get Steam and CUDA working at the same time, for example - but no showstopping problems.

I certainly don't have a debilitating kernel panic every week :)

I'm in the Linux space. My GTX 1060 works just fine.

What's your experience been with amdgpu?

At my end, that's what I have to start testing on my 2019 MBP as I plan a transition to bare metal Linux fully on it, using the tools at https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux. (Will take several months.) I'll be sure to document it in that community and share tips when extensive testing is done.

It's only MBP NVIDIA GPU in Linux (older model) that I have extensive experience on so far, and it's been terrible with nouveau.

Nvidia gpus require proprietary drivers that are only provided for specific distros and are only supported for a small amount of time. And if you find any bug well tough luck, nobody can help you. For a work setup that you rely on someone else in the company for support they might be fine but I wouldn't recommend them for a personal setup.

All this is on top of the fact that they still don't support Wayland and you have to reboot to switch between the igpu and the nvidia gpu.

10 years of support on the latest driver branch (current branch goes back to the 600 series, and the 400 series was dropped in June) doesn’t exactly seem like a small amount of time.

Yes that's what they say officially. You'd be hard pressed to run any of those old cards without issues.

> that are only provided for specific distros

Last time I looked, it was perfectly possible to install them directly, without support by the distro. Yes, it's more work.

> Nvidia gpus require proprietary drivers

There's an open source driver, nouveau, but of course it's behind the newest hardware.

>Last time I looked, it was perfectly possible to install them directly, without support by the distro. Yes, it's more work.

Yes, you can install them and they will break with every single update and you need to re-install them. And you will encounter bugs that no-one has any idea why they are there and no-one will help you with.

>There's an open source driver, nouveau, but of course it's behind the newest hardware.

It's not just behind, it's actively sabotaged by nvidia by locking basic hardware functions behind closed firmware that it encrypted.

It's pretty easy to buy Linux laptops these days.

Yes but to GP’s stated requirements, the trackpad feels like trying to push a marble around in peanut butter.

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