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by chme 952 days ago
Strange, for a company, advertising to the Linux community, to offer only Laptops with Nvidia dGPUs, where you actually have to taint your kernel/userspace with proprietary software in order to use it.
3 comments

There are basically no laptops with AMD GPUs. Why? I don't know. I think in the last months I've only seen one and I don't remember it as a laptop someone would buy.
Yeah they are quite rare, I bought an ASUS ROG Strix Advantage edition because it has an AMD CPU and GPU and have been quite happy with it.

I don’t know if they make them anymore but I highly recommend it.

Well, this is a company that creates Linux laptops. So if they decide to offer laptops with dGPU, they might want to use hardware that is well supported by Linux.

Laptops with Nvidia dGPUs are available from many/most other manufacturers, as you said, so there is no real reason to buy them from them. Especially if they offer sub-par Linux experience.

I get your point but I think this is an AMD problem.

Their can't keep up with the demand on the laptop market. How old are their Zen 4 processors? There are barely laptops with them. We had to wait months for a real use benchmark because it was impossible to get them.

Right now if I see and AMD GPU I wouldn't even know if it's new gen or from 3 years ago.

They are not on the market mobile market.

That's pretty dogmatic. I don't see much issue with proprietary drivers (even if it's not ideal how Linux handles that) if they actually worked properly, which unfortunately they don't..

Not that this is relevant for this laptop.

This isn't dogmatic, it is practical considerations.

From experience, open-source drivers that are integrated into the kernel and open-source source user space have much better quality, better out-of-box experience, and push the whole ecosystem forward.

Compared to closed-source drivers, which often need to catch up to modern software, and are difficult to debug, they need additional steps to integrate and often have to build their own stuff instead of improving existing solutions that help everyone.

You will not get helpful support for errors in your proprietary driver from the manifacturer in most cases, while you get support and fixes from the open source community. It is much easier to isolate the issues if you can access the code.

What do you mean "only"? This specific model has a AMD Radeon 780M card.
But that is a iGPU.
But the laptop does not have an Nvidia graphic card.
Well, aparantly my comment is not about this laptop then, because this laptop doesn't have a dGPU.

(But you are right, maybe I should have formulated it better. I meant all Laptops with dGPU they offer are with a Nvidia dGPU.)