These days I was wondering what laptop GPU would be the easiest to maintain / simplest to configure from a laptop POV?
Considering NixOS (I see Nix as gentoo++) or arch.
Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?
Would prefer open source but am not Uber passionate (results > means).
Fictional use case is mid tier game development - ray tracing is nice but stability and minimal effort to keep stable while pushing decent amounts shader/polygons is more important vs peak perf/px. No bitbro / artificial guess.
Experiences & recommendos?
The answer is AMD/AMD, regardless of whether you’re going for integrated or discreet. Reasons being stability and performance/price ratio. Stability because AMD’s open-source drivers are excellent and rarely break with updates (not that it doesn’t happen, but the breakage isn’t as frequent as nVidia, statistically speaking). Plus, AMD drivers play better with Wayland compared to nVidia (although in saying that, nVidia has made some significant advancements in Wayland support recently, but may still require some custom variable settings/tweaks).
I am not sure I want to sign this. I went for a full AMD laptop and the APU sucks balls. Up until a few linux versions ago, it would randomly lock up when a lot of video streams were on the screen. So whenever I was in a Google Meet, I could roll a dice if I have to hard-reset the machine or not. That seems to be fixed now, or I was lucky for the last few weeks.
Then when an external dual-monitor setup goes to sleep, waking up completely restarts X11 or Wayland - doesn’t matter which, they are both affected. So whenever I am in the office where I have that setup, I have to remember to disable any energy saving settings, otherwise I lose my open session every time I go for a coffee.
I never had any such problems on my machines with NVidia or Intel. So for integrated graphics, I would prefer Intel over AMD.
Not denying your experience, but the thing with comments like this is that it’s very anecdotal. There’s a lot of variables potentially at play here, ranging from the model of your APU/laptop, the DE you’re using, the display server, the kernel, the distro, the codecs you’ve installed etc, so it’s really hard to place the blame squarely on “AMD”.
But since we’re being anecdotal, I’d also like to say I haven’t experienced any such issues with my AMD laptop + APU. FWIW, here’s my full setup:
I second this, my all AMD Lenovo ThinkPad is the stablest machine I’ve ever had, even when I’m cooking it by playing some more demanding Steam titles.
I went with a laptop for the flexibility, sometimes I game, sometimes I just want to take my system with me.
In your case, go for a workstation instead.
Which thinkpad did you get? I’m looking at sunsetting my x1 extreme gen 2.
A basic Thinkpad E14 Gen3 with a Ryzen 7 5000.
What I liked about Lenovo is that I could tailor the laptop to my specifications on their site. I could order the machine with Linux pre-installed or with no OS. As I had no intention of sending any money to Microsoft, the value of the “Windows tax” went to doubling the systems’ RAM.
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