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).
It’s nowhere near that number. The Linux section of the Steam HW survey adds up to 62% AMD, 18% NVIDIA, 11% Intel and 8% other. This is pretty much flipped compared to the Windows numbers and suggests that Linux users have a very strong preference for AMD GPUs despite NVIDIA’s overall market share.
That’s because starting with April 2022 they mixed the AMD chipset from the Deck in with the PC stats. If you go back to March 2022 it’s different.
Yep, I realized that as soon as I posted and tried to ninja-delete but too late :)
If I sum up the numbers from March 2022 it’s 26% AMD and 38% NVIDIA.