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).
You can go AMD. Typically you’ll also be picking an AMD processor, which has a slight performance drop compared to Intel, but in the vast majority of use cases you won’t notice this.
You’re more likely to see an AMD processor with NVidia graphics than an Intel processor with AMD graphics. But AMD are a better choice, both for Linux graphics and in general morality.
AMD is great, but noone is selling good quality laptops with dedicated AMD graphics in my region.
Damn, that’s rubbish. Like I say I’ve seen a majority Intel, a greater majority NVidia, but still some AMD/AMD (as well as some AMD/NVidia).
Have you thought about getting someone else to order something for you overseas, then shipping it to you as a grey import?
That’s very expensive, I would need to pay pretty steep import fees. I’ve done this in the past but it’s costly.
Fair play, that sucks. I guess your best bet might be to go on holiday and buy it yourself, then hope customs don’t notice.
I have to book a 500+ euro flight to get somewhere that sells these laptops, so unlikely to be worthwhile (apart from the time and effort I don’t want to spend on it, either).
I’ll keep my eyes out for any used deals or new models coming out, but given my past experience, they’re always late to my market and not competitively priced.
Well, the point is that you’d be going on holiday regardless. You should go somewhere you want to go.
If anything, it sounds like maybe you get laptops cheaper than elsewhere. In which case it might be possible to do some kind of second hand exchange.
Saying all that though keeping an eye on the local second hand market is no bad shout.
Nah, laptops here are around 50% more expensive than in the US on average. Importing from the US is an option, but I need to pay a the price of the laptop, typically some $200 for insured shipping and handling from a freight forwarder, a customs processing fee to the local freight handler (typically 25-40 euros) and then 21% VAT over the sum of all those costs (so price of laptop + shipping + freight forwarding + insurance + customs processing).
And all this requires a lot of effort, waiting and hoping nothing goes wrong.
I typically don’t travel far these days (I have young kids, long plane flights are not an option with them), and close by countries have largely the same issues as mine, as well as weird local keyboard layouts.