this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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How do y'all get past the Nvidia Optimus issues? All the Windows machines in my house have Nvidia graphics, which means at least the laptops have Optimus. I would love to move my wife's laptop over to Linux when Windows 10 goes EOL, but I had a work laptop with Optimus that ran Ubuntu, and the thing was a nightmare. I didn't really mind because it was a work laptop. But it caused so many issues coming in and out of sleep that I just disabled sleep altogether. I had horrible screen tearing issues. The GPU performance was bad (probably because I had to use the open source driver to fix the screen tearing issues). It was just a horrible experience that I could look past, but my wife can't.
Linux Mint has the Additional Driver section on Settings. It'll provide you with options. For your graphic driver, select the recommended one, which would most likely be the proprietary driver for nvidia. Hit OK, and restart.
But the proprietary Nvidia driver doesn't work for Optimus at all. It's super buggy.
What hardware do you have? I've tested it to work on Dell Latitude E6430 (NVS 5200) as well as Thinkpad W530 (K1000M & K2000M) with version 390 driver.
I had a Dell Latitude for work. Idk which model exactly. But this is a pretty well-known and well-documented problem. I'm not the only person that ran into it. It's discussed on this community pretty frequently.
I'm fine tweaking things to get it working, but my wife is not, and the average user is not. My wife just wants a laptop that works, but Windows is pretty shit these days and is getting worse by the day. I'm not sure how much longer it will "work" by her standards.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/11zw585/nvidia_driver_will_not_wake_monitor_after_sleep/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/systemds-suspend-then-hibernate-not-working-in-nvidia-optimus-laptop/213690
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/not-coming-back-from-suspend/176446
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/screen-tearing-optimus-laptop-asus-tuf-a15-2021/198361
I guess it can be hit or miss with nvidia. One potential solution is to disable the Optimus and run the nvidia entirely.
I might end up doing that for her. That would kill battery though, right?
I can probably make a bootable USB drive and try it on her laptop for a while and see how it works before I blow out Windows.
Depending on your need battery life might not be a concern.
Yes, USB drive is a good way to try it out.
I just tried it actually. It was working fine until I installed the Nvidia drivers, and now I just get a black screen when it boots.
I wanted to try openSuse Tumbleweed to have something a little more up to date than Ubuntu. But I'm bored of fiddling with this right now, so I'm going to come back to this later.
that means one of this things
i did find the nvidia driver setup on opensuse tumbleweed quite a hassle for some reason, despite everything else working flawlessly.
it would be good to know the hardware you're using because it would tell the level of support you'd get. one of the reasons i picked my w530 is because its k2000 gpu is well supported by both open source & proprietary ones.
Idk, I got bored of debugging what was going on so I started over and just installed from scratch again. This time I didn't fidget around with Bumblebee or anything. I checked and it had the nouveau driver installed by default, which was playing much nicer with my system than I remember it with my old laptop. Anyway, I replaced it with the Nvidia driver from command line. Last time I tried downloading the .run from their website and that nuked everything. Everything seems to be running fine. I played through the prologue of Skyrim, which has been my test for a while now. It's definitely running on the GPU, because I was able to max out the framerate on ultra settings (not that hard, but my CPU couldn't do that). I'm suspecting that everything is running on the GPU right now, but it's late and I need to go to bed.
I just ordered another SSD, because my laptop has a slot open. I'm just gonna dual boot for a while before I commit to it and wipe out Windows.
Thanks for the encouragement. This laptop/distro combo seems to be performing very well compared to my experience in the past.
So far I found Linux Mint (and probably the rest of Ubuntu based) to be the nicest with my nVidia GPU thru their Additional Drivers menu.
Anywho, I hope it works out for you and your wife!