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Comment by Jnr | Hacker News Reader

Even though M1 MBP runs Linux, it has a very basic GPU driver, no hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The "Fastest CPU + GPU + battery life" probably will not be true if using Linux on it. Would be great if Asahi users could provide regular benchmarks between MacOS and Linux on M1, to see how it is progressing.

When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.

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> When it comes to Thinkpads and other similar laptops - get one without the dedicated Nvidia GPU. That is just a nightmare on Linux.

Second this. I got a Thinkpad P1 off eBay (basically the X1C with a dedicated GPU) from a similar recommendation thread on HN somewhere and actually have gotten it to work but this aspect has been difficult to sort out.

Using Oryx Pro with Nvidia, and it is a breeze. Depends on your manufacturer supporting your hardware, I guess.

P1 is based on X1 extreme, not X1 carbon, just FYI

Thirded. As an owner of Thinkpad X1 Extreme with Nvidia GPU, I'm never going to buy another laptop with Nvidia inside.

What problems have you been having?

I shared some in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34183088

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?

Nvidia proprietary. Never was interested in battery life to be honest. However my Thinkpad P1 gen3 does last coding over 4h flights, can tell you that.

They do "work", but the dynamic GPU switching is problematic, especially with Wayland. Especially when using external monitors. I could not have decent performance and heat/noise using external monitors.

You can (and really have to) stick to using X but multi-dpi monitor mixing there is problematic.

Also the KMS and tty management seems a bit buggy with Nvidia (even with early KMS).

And then even after you get all of this working "fine" with X or Wayland expect some random crashes of the desktop environment.

Then if you somehow survive the crashes, sleep mode is extremely unreliable, even when using the correct nvidia systemd hooks.

Not all of these are "driver" issues, but those are real life issues when trying to use multi-gpu laptops with Linux, when one of those GPU's come from Nvidia.

I also have Linux computers with Intel and AMD GPU's and that is a completely different story.

This is usually because the video outputs are often connected only to the discrete gpu, while the laptop screen is only connected to the integrated GPU, meaning you have to use both if you want monitors. On desktop, NVIDIA mostly works if you stick to X11 and deal with their proprietary driver. However, the hybrid graphics switching presents a lot of problems. Some ThinkPads actually can behave like desktops and disable the iGPU entirely, since they have a mux that can connect the dGPU to the laptop screen directly, without using any render offload shenanigans, though at a great cost of battery life.

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