Hi all,

I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.

I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?

The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.

Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).

  • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    113·
    8 months ago

    Desktop replacement gaming laptops are a mistake. You can buy a normal laptop and the parts to build a gaming desktop for the same price and the laptop will be much more practical to carry around while the desktop will perform better and last longer.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
      52·
      8 months ago

      And you will be able to upgrade a desktop computer. You could at some point swap the GPU or buy another stick of RAM for $60, whereas most things are soldered in laptops nowadays. Oftentimes they even solder the RAM to move it closer to the CPU and make the laptop a bit cheaper since it now requires less mechanical brackets/parts.

      Also a laptop will almost never get the same performance because it’s more difficult to get all the heat out and it’ll switch to a lower clockrate once all the heat builds up in that small form-factor.

      But it can be worth it if you need one device that can do both gaming and be carried around. Desktop replacements are quite popular. But they come with exactly those downsides. And it may be or might not be cheaper than buying one ultrabook plus a pc that’s tailored to gaming. It’s always a compromise, though.

    • wim@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      21·
      8 months ago

      I mean that’s fine if that’s your opinion. But while they may be a mistake for you, I’ve found them to be a great compromise and enjoyed several of them for the past 10 years.

      I have a normal laptop, a ThinkPad X1 Nano, which I love. I also have a desktop with an RX 6800, but I can only use that in my office, a cramped space which has poor Internet and is in an inconvenient spot in our house.

      I’m looking for something that I can keep in the living room, and set up on our living room table to play some games with friends. I’ve had that desktop for almost 3 years and yet I’ve done most of my gaming since I had it on a 2013 Alienware laptop with an upgraded MXM graphics card.

      Different solutions for different people.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      32·
      8 months ago

      But desktop builds won’t use less electricity. I use a desktop replacement gaming laptop at home, without taking it anywhere, because it consumes less power