Hi all,

I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.

I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?

The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.

Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).

  • @[email protected]
    3•1 year ago

    A few reasons:

    • There is a strong desire to see if there is secret sauce in the driver that makes their cards so darn performant. Could it be applied to other video drivers?
    • To audit for vulnerabilities and fix them.
    • To allow the driver to use some kernel internals that the kernel developers keep trying to wall proprietary drivers off from.
    • Ideology
    • Community might be able to hack it to work better with Wayland, since the Wayland team has no interest in extending any kind of support to proprietary driver driving GPU’s… despite x11 working just fine forever. … see Ideology.