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State of the Nvidia open source driver in late 2023? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by wim@lemmy.sdf.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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).

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[-] rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

And you will be able to upgrade a desktop computer. You could at some point swap the GPU or buy another stick of RAM for $60, whereas most things are soldered in laptops nowadays. Oftentimes they even solder the RAM to move it closer to the CPU and make the laptop a bit cheaper since it now requires less mechanical brackets/parts.

Also a laptop will almost never get the same performance because it's more difficult to get all the heat out and it'll switch to a lower clockrate once all the heat builds up in that small form-factor.

But it can be worth it if you need one device that can do both gaming and be carried around. Desktop replacements are quite popular. But they come with exactly those downsides. And it may be or might not be cheaper than buying one ultrabook plus a pc that's tailored to gaming. It's always a compromise, though.

this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
104 points (96.4% liked)

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