These days I was wondering what laptop GPU would be the easiest to maintain / simplest to configure from a laptop POV?

Considering NixOS (I see Nix as gentoo++) or arch.

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

Would prefer open source but am not Uber passionate (results > means).

Fictional use case is mid tier game development - ray tracing is nice but stability and minimal effort to keep stable while pushing decent amounts shader/polygons is more important vs peak perf/px. No bitbro / artificial guess.

Experiences & recommendos?

  • pamymaf
    2•1 year ago

    @PuppyOSAndCoffee I have a laptop with an Intel GPU with Iris graphics. Initially it was a huge pain to get it working as the kernel version to support it hadn’t been released yet. However, NixOS gave me enough freedom to set my kernel version to a release candidate that fixed it. Now that they’ve rolled the new kernel into the main nixpkgs the graphics work fine.

    And for what it’s worth, my desktop with an nvidia gtx1080 works just fine with NixOS (at least for casual gaming) by allowing it to run unfree software and telling it to use an nvidia driver.