In the meanwhile, people with nvidia laptops can enjoy a blinking white cursor on a black display. Courtesy of nvidia Optimus and their “wonderful” first party linux support for it.
Hence why I gave up on Year of Linux Desktop already around Windows 7 time.
I rather run Linux on a VM than keeping to deal with lack of laptop support, optimum isn't the only example.
Even my Asus 1215B, bought with Linux, the last generation of the netboooks effort, wasn't without issues, wlan driver was one, graphics card support for video acceleration and same OpenGL level as on Windows 7 were another.
You will get at max 40 fps on external monitor connected to nvidia GPU, on wayland.
New version of their driver fix few things but introduce new bugs. I suggest anyone who wants to use Linux to stay away from laptop that have nvidia GPU.
It’s great we recently got the feature for wayland. But for X it’s been a wild ride of bumblebee and using prime-run and full offloading for many years.
The arch wiki is still not a first party solution. As it stands, no normal user should have to go through that. The best option I’ve found is to just stick with Pop!_OS - they have a switcher set up and it actually works.
And once the user sets up Optimus, they can continue down the arch wiki for setting up hardware video decode on their browsers manually, and every other feature that nobody should have to mind.
It is now dead, but on my Asus 1215B VA-API, with AMD, it never got hardware acceleration regardless of the endless entries on online forums I have digged through.
Maybe I should eventually have used anything else other than Ubuntu LTS, but then we are again to the endless stream of "Why are you using XYZ distro, use ZYX instead, it works for me" comments.
I have a 3050 laptop GPU. Nouveau is fine for basic desktop usage. Even for 3D games it's shockingly good (on Vulkan games anyway). I haven't really noticed much difference between Nouveau and the proprietary drivers to be honest...
The biggest thing I notice is that the card is severely lacking VRAM, to the point where most of the games I play run better on the iGPU (which can make use of up to 16gb of system RAM).
I’m actually shocked you got it to play games like that. I have several nvidia laptops that I use ranging from a 750M, to gtx 1650, to a rtx 4050. Every couple of months I’ll switch back to the dedicated GPU to run a sanity check for features, and do a 180 in an hour. I understand making compromises on shadowplay, GeForce streaming, the control centre, and the nvidia app as a whole. But I always notice microstuttering that shouldn’t be there and draw the line at having to manually set up VDPAU/VAAPI and keeping up with the trends of what this year’s optimal way to install games is (which DE on which back end, playonlinux vs lutris vs winetricks vs proton, etc).
I’m glad you got your 3050 to do basic things and hope you get more use out of it as software improves.
NB: IMO the best Linux nvidia laptops are the Lenovo legions. They have a bios switch to force the use of the nvidia chip and mask the iGPU. Half the issues are gone then.
Are you using Wayland? One thing I’ve noticed is that windows are allocated greedily in Wayland and Chrome in particular is more than happy to eat all your VRAM. There’s nothing like there is in Windows/Mac to swap out / drop and recreate existing allocations when you’re out of VRAM.
I rather run Linux on a VM than keeping to deal with lack of laptop support, optimum isn't the only example.
Even my Asus 1215B, bought with Linux, the last generation of the netboooks effort, wasn't without issues, wlan driver was one, graphics card support for video acceleration and same OpenGL level as on Windows 7 were another.