Thats why i never buy their shit after having one laptop with one of their graphics.
Worst part? I'm still using that laptop, im doing troubleshooting right now.
Anyone else?
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This reminds me of the nightmare of those laptops with intel and nvidia gpu so you could switch to nvidia if you wanted to game. And what a nightmare it was to even get the nvidia gpu working in linux.
When I'm buying new hardware I'll make sure never to buy nvidia again. However sometimes I am gifted things and it would be rude to refuse to accept.
This is what mine has. I was able to get it working with bumblebee on kali. Just switched to Debian 12, and I thought it would work after installing the non-free drivers, but nope. So guess I get to do some reading up on that now. Maybe look into bumblebee again.
I did get mine working eventually. Though that laptop died years ago. I did not get it to switch though so when I ran Linux it was always on the Nvidia GPU. But that wasn't an issue for me.
I remember there being a name for this that made it easier to search for a solution. But for the life of me I cannot remember what it was.
Good luck on your quest and I hope you get it working.
omg i've been in this rabbit hole trying to get a friend's laptop working right for the last 2 weeks... I found the name of the thing you are talking about, where the dGPU HAS to talk to the integrated graphics to get to the laptop screen... and then promptly forgot it after getting so mad at such a stupid idea and when I went to google it again to find articles i had previously read I couldn't find it. :(
I decided to take a look and I think it's called Nvidia Optimus. A more general term would be hybrid graphics I guess.
And I think I may have come across the Bumblebee project back then: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project
Maybe this helps.
I finally got it working and feel like an idiot now. Secure boot was enabled. Thing is, I know I disabled it because you have to set a bios password in order to do so. But it somehow got re-enabled. Once I disabled secure boot again the Debian wiki instructions worked and it was pretty simple to do.
If you haven't already, check for Nouveau support. And if your card is supported, you may need a kernel parameter. I needed
nouveau.config=NvClkMode=15(but be warned some parameters like that have some risk, like possibility of overheating, and may or may not be applicable or safe for your GPU).For me, it has worked to just set environment variable
DRI_PRIME=1to use the Nvidia GPU for that specific application. (Maybe this is what Bumblebee does; I don't know.)In the future, though, I recommend avoiding Nvidia hardware.
As I mentioned in another comment, in my experience Nouveau does a much better job with multi-display and multi-GPU systems than Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Unfortunately Nouveau's actual hardware support is somewhat limited, so that is only relevant for a subset of Nvidia GPUs.
I, too, don't want any more Nvidia hardware.
Thanks for the info!
Nouveau at least for the GPU I've got is worse than just using integrated graphics
nouveau is hardly better than software rendering in most cases. heck, for pretty much every GPU from the last decade, it isn't even able to adjust the GPU clock frequency (so it's permanently stuck on the lowest frequency).
I remember finding large text file in the win 10 base install that was just a list of game titles. I assumed it was so they could specifically choose which processes should always use the dGPU. I'm searching around now and can't find any evidence it ever existed though. Anyone else remember seeing it? I feel like there was something about an inappropriate/porn game being included on the list.
Now that sounds interesting. I did not know about that.