4 ms·

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

by Aspos 4y ago

nine_k 4y ago
Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?
- Aspos 4y ago
  Nvidia proprietary. Never was interested in battery life to be honest. However my Thinkpad P1 gen3 does last coding over 4h flights, can tell you that.
Jnr 4y ago
They do "work", but the dynamic GPU switching is problematic, especially with Wayland. Especially when using external monitors. I could not have decent performance and heat/noise using external monitors. You can (and really have to) stick to using X but multi-dpi monitor mixing there is problematic. Also the KMS and tty management seems a bit buggy with Nvidia (even with early KMS). And then even after you get all of this working "fine" with X or Wayland expect some random crashes of the desktop environment. Then if you somehow survive the crashes, sleep mode is extremely unreliable, even when using the correct nvidia systemd hooks. Not all of these are "driver" issues, but those are real life issues when trying to use multi-gpu laptops with Linux, when one of those GPU's come from Nvidia. I also have Linux computers with Intel and AMD GPU's and that is a completely different story.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  This is usually because the video outputs are often connected only to the discrete gpu, while the laptop screen is only connected to the integrated GPU, meaning you have to use both if you want monitors. On desktop, NVIDIA mostly works if you stick to X11 and deal with their proprietary driver. However, the hybrid graphics switching presents a lot of problems. Some ThinkPads actually can behave like desktops and disable the iGPU entirely, since they have a mux that can connect the dGPU to the laptop screen directly, without using any render offload shenanigans, though at a great cost of battery life.

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

by Aspos 4y ago

I have 4 ThinkPads with Nvidia GPUs on my desk now and none had driver issues in Ubuntu, they all work out of the box.

nine_k 4y ago

Noveau or Nvidia's proprietary? How's battery life when you're not using the GPU heavily (normal desktop work)?

Aspos 4y ago
Nvidia proprietary. Never was interested in battery life to be honest. However my Thinkpad P1 gen3 does last coding over 4h flights, can tell you that.

Jnr 4y ago

They do "work", but the dynamic GPU switching is problematic, especially with Wayland. Especially when using external monitors. I could not have decent performance and heat/noise using external monitors. You can (and really have to) stick to using X but multi-dpi monitor mixing there is problematic. Also the KMS and tty management seems a bit buggy with Nvidia (even with early KMS). And then even after you get all of this working "fine" with X or Wayland expect some random crashes of the desktop environment. Then if you somehow survive the crashes, sleep mode is extremely unreliable, even when using the correct nvidia systemd hooks. Not all of these are "driver" issues, but those are real life issues when trying to use multi-gpu laptops with Linux, when one of those GPU's come from Nvidia. I also have Linux computers with Intel and AMD GPU's and that is a completely different story.

alwayslikethis 4y ago
This is usually because the video outputs are often connected only to the discrete gpu, while the laptop screen is only connected to the integrated GPU, meaning you have to use both if you want monitors. On desktop, NVIDIA mostly works if you stick to X11 and deal with their proprietary driver. However, the hybrid graphics switching presents a lot of problems. Some ThinkPads actually can behave like desktops and disable the iGPU entirely, since they have a mux that can connect the dGPU to the laptop screen directly, without using any render offload shenanigans, though at a great cost of battery life.