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Comment by frabbit | Hacker News Reader

I had hoped that after many years of laptops containing Intel/nVidia hybrid graphics, this setup would largely work, but was disappointed.

Both the proprietary nVidia driver and the nouveau driver would not work reliably for me. I ran into kernel error messages and hard-freezes, with even SSH sessions to the machine breaking.

Nvidia GPUs are still the number one problem. Buying anything with Nvidia in it is a waste of money. Closed source binary drivers that only work sometimes is acceptable for gamers but not if you want a reliable, controlled machine.

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> Nvidia GPUs are still the number one problem. Buying anything with Nvidia in it is a waste of money. Closed source binary drivers that only work sometimes is acceptable for gamers but not if you want a reliable, controlled machine.

No it's not a hardware problem, it's a pure software / platform problem. The experience is phantastic on Windows. The reason why I went with Windows 10 base and Linux VM & WSL2 (which is pretty seamless) instead of vv is that I did not want to spend time caring about Optimus, PRIME and having to consider the dGPU/iGPU mux topology in order to get my hardware to work correctly.

Talk to me when decent laptops with AMD dedicated and/or APU graphics and >1080p IPS displays exist.

Except they already do. Also, AMD announced SmartShift ("shifts power inside your laptop for the optimal performance for a given task") support for Linux a couple of days ago. They're more than usable nowadays.

Probably a popular opinion here, but any display with a higher res than 1440p (1600p if it's a 16:10 display) is a waste on a laptop. I'd rather have a 1080p one over a 4K one, personally.

> Except they already do. Also, AMD announced SmartShift ("shifts power inside your laptop for the optimal performance for a given task") support for Linux a couple of days ago. They're more than usable nowadays.

Interesting, thanks!

> Probably a popular opinion here, but any display with a higher res than 1440p (1600p if it's a 16:10 display) is a waste on a laptop. I'd rather have a 1080p one over a 4K one, personally.

I don't disagree that 4k is a little nuts on a ~15" laptop LCD, but it seems until recently you're options for decent >1080p displays on laptops for the most part were a) Macbooks (2880x1800 at 15.4"), and b) 4k PC laptops

It misses your >1080p mark, but the DELL G5 SE is a budget workhorse with a remarkably good screen (once calibrated).

Zen 2 6/8 core, RX5600, and uses AMDs shiftable power budget. Dual SSD slots as well.

It’s a plastic fantastic for sure, but at the $800 I paid 6 months ago it’s been a great machine.

Setting up Optimus is quite the miserable experience, and nouveau being pretty much useless is exasperating. I just gave up and "disabled" the discrete GPU on my thinkpad, as intel's iGPUs are good enough for all daily tasks and more.

The RTX 3060 in my machine is working well under Windows and Linux. It's a bit tricky to set up, but it's been super stable for me, with no crashes in the past few months.

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