I'd stick with Windows in your case. No shame in using what works. I had a laptop with hybrid Nvidia graphics and never could get it working satisfactorily with Linux.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Great point. I, too, had to wait to go full Linux until I wasn't reliant on an NVidia graphics card.
There is no shame in defeat so long as the spirit remains unconquered.
Quoting of course from the great Dragoon Fenix.
For he, how the humans says, can still throw down with the best of us.
I think the issue might be that Nvidia just doesn't support that chipset on the latest drivers. They whacked all the mobile chipsets about a year ago, so all the GeForce mobile stuff doesn't work on latest releases. You'll probably be stuck at a lesser point release for actual desktop-driving stuff, but things like Proton won't be able to work with it anymore as they advance.
This is more about the DirectX interaction with the abstraction layers though.
How I prevent the driver update?
Go to the Nvidia Driver Support page, put in your model, and run the binary installer version it points you to. It should handle everything for you, or output an error if your card is no longer supported.
You can also give the Nouveau driver a shot, but it can be somewhat problematic.
Off-topic but may I ask what is your disability? I am disabled as well after suffering a stroke that I wasn't supposed to live through, and am passively looking for others like me to game with (I mean anybody is cool but it'd be nice to have others that are in similar situations, for support and stuff). I play racing / shooters / strategy games one-handed, partially blind, with some cognitive struggles.
Hate to say it but I agree with bilb, you might need to stick with windows. I tried Linux on a hybrid graphics laptop a few years ago and it was a disaster. I did get a handful of games to work but nothing that would actually push the graphics card. It was more trouble than it was worth.
I know it doesn't help you, but on desktop with AMD it’s been smooth sailing .
How often do you use hybrid mode? Even back when I used Windows, I found I had so little use for it that I disabled it in the BIOS in order to maximize FPS.
I mostly used that laptop for non gaming stuff, and hybrid worked well in Windows. The problem in Linux was that I couldn’t get it to switch modes reliably.
It’s an old laptop though. Newer ones may work much better for all I know.
Piper is probably what you want for the mouse (and maybe solaar which handles unifying receiver/bolt connectivity.
As far as Nvidia goes though, that's likely to be the sticking point right now. Maybe at some point they will clean up their act, but I wouldn't hold my breathe so I wouldn't ask you to wait.
Windows 10 may be the better fit right now, and that's ok. Maybe Nvidia will release new drivers in a few weeks or months and you'll have more options, but for now I think Win10 may be the best fit for what you need.
Edit: Maybe see if Mint works out? https://lemmy.world/post/15653242
The problem probably has to do with Wayland and NVIDIA not being very good together, thanks to NVIDIA. You’ll get a lot of glitches in your environment if you use them together. You can try logging in using X11 instead of Wayland, that’s what I do and it works great. I heard somebody say there’s an update coming from NVIDIA that’s supposed to fix things with Wayland, but whether it actually does is anyone’s guess.
In the future, I would go with AMD for gaming. NVIDIA has been becoming shittier the last several years, for both Windows and Linux. This laptop I have now is the last PC I’ll buy with an NVIDIA GPU.
EDIT: You should also consider disabling hybrid mode in the BIOS, even if you go back to Windows. The extra battery life probably isn’t worth the decreased performance you get while gaming.
Did try x11 and had various problems with that too as well as severe performance drops in games, even ones with native Linux support.
Also did check the hybrid option in bios and various places and there isn't any options for it anywhere.
Oh that sucks for the hybrid option. Most hybrids allow you to turn that off, and you get a fair FPS boost for it in most games. I’m surprised the Omen doesn’t allow it.
For my hybrid laptop, I have to control it with prime-select instead of in bios. I wonder if the games were actually running on the nvidia GPU. If they weren't, you could have lots of performance problems. Did nvidia-smi say that the games were running on them?
Sadly KDE 6 broke a lot of stuff, the next Nvidia driver update 555 should fix most of those issues (it's in beta right now).
For single issues with games you should specify more so we can help.
I'm using an MMO mouse (the ones with 12 buttons on the side) myself, and sadly there is no mouse with native support for macro on Linux, but a lot of them are supported thanks to developers (see Piper for example), which mouse is it?
I had bought a Thinkpad T580 with an nVidia Geforce MX 150. Not a great card by any means. But it should have been enough to run Doom 2016 at about 30 fps.
But the firmware has been super butchered and this fucking thing throttles so aggressively that it even struggles with Quake 3. It's because of some Windows-only thermal configuration that defaults to the most conservative values without OS support. The CPU side of things has since been fixed on Linux (which was throttling too much as well) and ironically that made the GPU side worse because CPU and GPU share a heatpipe.
And fucking nVidia is locked behind tons of proprietary garbage and it's impossible to change anything.
Fortunately I was eventually able to afford a Steam Deck. It's saved my bedridden disabled ass from insanity.
I had pretty good luck with Garuda on an old gaming laptop. In fact I’m pretty sure gaming wise it worked out of the box. Any tweaks I made were for other use cases.
I love garuda
Using NVIDIA Graphics for gaming, I have had the most luck and best performance on Pop!_OS. Thanks to their easy driver-setup and Proton on Steam, I am yet to have a game not run properly.
Keep trying, check protondb for the games you want to play, popos is probably the best, or garuda has support for nvidia out of the box
If nothing else just try back once or twice a year whenever you see a new release from the distro you want to use. The 1660 is a pretty common card so in general it should be well supported.
Oh yeah I try every like 4-6 months because of the fucking windows is garbage and I want Linux to work. I saw the most recent update to kde and apparently Nvidia which gave me a lot of hope but still have problems regardless. Probably will get cravings again for Linux in like 4-6 months then try it all over again
I have a Helios predator with nvidia 1060 mobile. I use garuda and it works well, maybe try garuda next time if you do let me know and I can try to help if anything pops up
Yeah, getting the dedicated graphics card and other peripherals on laptop to work is one step more difficult than on desktops.
Check out Windows Xlite, they have 10 and 11. Their install iso's are stripped of all Microsoft's bullshit.
Can you explain what exactly doesnt work for you: i have a laptop with nvidia graphics runnin pop-os without any problems. Maybe we view the experience differently.
The games I play (which might be different from yours) run perfectly, the DE (gnome) doesnt have glitches or crashes for me. I would really like to see what exactly you see as a glitch.
If an application dies and doesnt react because it has a bug, does that bother you? Because its the exact thing that happens on windows (not talking about the additional crap windows has on top).