| Thanks for the Skylake information. > Install Linux you mean. I'll preface this by saying I should have mentioned it's an Nvidia Optimus equipped laptop, a Dell Inspiron i5 7559 and that I've been running Linux to some capacity or another on a variety of hardware for nearly two decades now and will probably never stop using it, so believe me I'm aware that trying Linux on otherwise landfilled hardware is always worth a consideration. So no, I don't mean 'Install linux'. Until about 6 months ago I was running Fedora on it (historically Slackware and Kubuntu). Nvidia Optimus is garbage and I refuse to put up with it any longer. Whether it was an Ubuntu derivative with its own means for handling this or not I've found that Nvidia Optimus under Linux is a recipe for tearing, poor battery life, lots of heat when doing seemingly nothing and frequently fighting Nvidia drivers failing to work when I update the kernel. This laptop does not give you the ability to disable the Intel GPU and use just the nvidia GPU, so the only option that makes the laptop decently usable is to just not install nvidia drivers at all and use only the Intel GPU, but even then it was never stable enough to live with day to day. It didn't matter what distro I ran, it just randomly would freeze without any useful information in the logs as to why. I realize this is Nvidia's fault more than anyone else's but I just don't have the energy to fight it anymore, particularly because it was 100% trouble free anytime Windows 10 was running. Once Windows 10 goes fully EOL I am either recycling this laptop or giving it away, it can be somebody else's problem. The replacement laptop will either be straight Intel or AMD, I'm done with Nvidia. A happier story is the Asus U43F. I believe it was a first gen Core i5; it had a bios bug in it that prevented installing Windows 10, it was stuck on 7, didn't have any EFI support. Asus and Microsoft both refused to do anything about it so it was completely abandoned. I installed a linux distro on it and my niece used it during the pandemic when they were forced to do school from home. It worked out great. I got it back later and sold it to somebody who understood they needed to run Linux on it and as far as I know to this day it still works just fine. |
I heard PopOS works with Optimus out of the box, but I'm still gonna get a laptop with an AMD APU as I don't want the headaches of discrete GPUs and MUXs, plus I don't game too much anyway.
If a lot of games can run on the Steam Deck, then they can definitely run on laptops with similar or better AMD APUs, no need for discrete GPUs anymore unless you're a proper gamer, but for casual and retro gaming it should be good enough.