Thanks to Nvidia, there's a new generation of PCs coming and they'll run Linux
zdnet.com43 points by CrankyBear 6 hours ago
43 points by CrankyBear 6 hours ago
This article is pure conjecture and doesn’t have anything to back up the title beyond “these brands also happen to use mediatek” and making a tenuous link between their Chromebook products and the Digit system.
There's also Lenovo with their upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X based desktop [1]. Between Qualcomm and Mediatek they produced probably more than 90% world's smartphone.
If they start selling Linux desktops they will probably very popular if they have comparable performance with mainstream x86 based desktops but with more affordable price.
[1] Lenovo announces world’s first mini desktop PCs powered by Snapdragon X chips:
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/desktop-computers/lenovo...
Even after reading I don't get why anyone would consider a laptop with nvidia over amd. Buying an amd thinkpad was one of my best choices of 2024
I think they’re saying that NVIDIA is already making high performance arm processors, and announced a high-end desktop arm that’ll run linux by default.
Not sure though. It would let them compete with my Ryzen SoC mini-pc, assuming they fix their drivers (and get the linux taint bit to stay off).
> But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?
Do they already exist, are they announced, or are these products in their roadmap?
No? Then what on earth are we talking about here?
The author really thinks people care about Linux desktop? No, people want laptops that works. I don't know what that means exactly, but I highly doubt we are anywhere close to thinking Linux desktop is usable for everyone.
Why does any of that make sense? It’s an enterprise play for them. You see Mac minis used all over for their compact form factor behind tvs. This is a similar play for enterprises but development and IT deployment of AI chips. I don’t even know if it will pan out
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.
It's quite easy to get a running Nvidia Optimus setup nowadays. Just go through arch wiki if on X, and just use drivers >560 for Wayland.
Is there anything I'm not in the loop or?
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.
X is long dead. It is only reasonable for NVIDIA to focus on working wayland experience since that's where Linux desktop is.
For hw-accel, just use nouveau and VA-API will work out of the box. (Yes, nvidia is contributing to nouveau these days).
X is anything but dead. XFCE and KDE have working x11 DEs. If anything, you get higher performance on it relative wayland in some use cases.[0][1]
Nouveau last time I checked has practically no support for modern nvidia chips (read: 5 years ago to now) in CUDA, performance states, 2D, and 3D.[3]
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/review/wayland-nv-amd-2023
[1] https://discuss.kde.org/t/wayland-vs-x-benchmarking-results-...
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).
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.
You’re talking about swap? You can allocate a swap partition and register it in the fstab and the kernel as well and happily swap out to it. Unlike windows and mac, you can set the swappiness too to go from conservative to aggressive.
Yes I'm using Wayland. The problem has nothing to do with Chrome usage or whatever. The desktop is super smooth no matter how many Chrome tabs I have or other apps. Also Gnome likes to use the iGPU by default so nothing to do with the Nvidia GPU really. For games I've tested both with iGPU or forcing them to use the Nvidia GPU.
The problem is games which have a lot of high res textures, it's obvious the dedicated GPU runs out of RAM. It's pretty speedy on games running at half-resolution and it can render a lot of effects like bloom, fancy lighting, reflections, etc... But I'd say my current go to game is Civ 6, I like to play at full resolution with high textures, which the dedicated GPU can't handle but the iGPU can without even heating up all that much.
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.
> which DE on which back end, playonlinux vs lutris vs winetricks vs proton, etc
KDE on Proton is the way.
they were 5 years behind AMD on drivers, maybe now they're 3, so maybe in their next generation
echo "$(($(date +%Y)+1)) is the year of the Linux desktop."