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Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

Their entire graphics setup on the X1 and P1 laptops is atrocious, and I've definitely bitched about it here before. Basically, you can't turn off GPU without loosing the external HDMI, so you need to leave it on if you use an external monitor. But that eats battery. And you can't easily turn the GPU on/off whenever you "go mobile" - it requires an Xorg restart. There's some software crap you can do (Bumblebee? Primus?) that works on some distros but it's a total pain in the ass on others. There isn't a clear consensus on which to use either, and I haven't found a single sane set of instructions for it anyway. Avoid avoid avoid.

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Absolutely agree with you. Still suffering from it. Worst and most expensive experience since more than 20 years of ThinkPads. I was buying ThinkPads for the good linux support, the keyboard, the Trackpoint, the excellent repairability and extendability. Last year august ordered the P1 Gen 3 without Nvidia, after being delayed for more than 2 months and I had to go on travel, cancelled it. In hindsight it was good to cancel, the gen 3 apparently has the same heat problems. Maybe the gen 4 will be better, however already now is known that key travel has been shortened. If there would be another brand that fullfils my requirements, would switch in a heartbeat.

Honestly, I bought my X1 Extreme Gen2 explicitly for the Nvidia GPU. Having had trouble to get multiple external monitors to work, along the integrated display, I run it basically since day one with the Intel GPU deactivated in Bios. My understanding is that, besides the fingerprint reader, dual GPUs are the main problem regarding Linux on that machine. If so, I don't care. Not that I had the time trying it out so yet.

Isn't it the way Intel designed their reference motherboard?

No idea. All I know it's that the HDMI is hardwired to the NVIDIA on these Lenovo laptops. I don't think it has to be this way. Surely that Intel integrated graphics chip is capable of driving an external HDMI? Perhaps what they should have don't was make the hardware of the port switchable. Even a physical switch would have done.

It's so that you can drive more monitors than a single GPU supports. For example, my T430 with discrete graphics could drive 4 monitors simultaneously while the iGPU model was limited to 2 (3 unofficially).

It became so annoying at one point that I just replaced the motherboard with the iGPU version. Apparently now nvidia optimus support on Linux is improving somewhat, but having had to deal with this and other issues for years, I'm probably never getting an nvidia GPU again unless I absolutely have to.

If they broke the ability to easily connect 1x monitor in the attempt to support more than 3x monitors, I don't know what to say. The needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few.

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