h3ndrik, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I don’t think so. I can’t find any good information about those new ‘open-source’ kernel modules in any of the Linux wikis. Just news articles from 2022. Something isn’t right there. It’s either a marketing stunt and nothing changed or something else. I would dig deeper if I were you.

Concerning NVidia’s history: Don’t rely on them making user-friendly decisions. Especially when it comes to Linux. The usual drivers work. They have some hiccups and you’re going to have some annoying issues with things like Wayland, if something major changes in the kernel you have to wait for NVidia but they’ll eventually fix it. It’s not open source and you have to live with what they give to you. It mostly works though and performance is great. I’d say this is the same with the newer ‘open-source’ drivers that just shift things into (proprietary) userspace and firmware.

The true open-source alternative is the ‘Nouveau’ drivers. For newer graphics cards, expect them to get only a fraction of the performance out of your GPU and having half the features not yet implemented, including power management. So your game will have 10fps and fans on max while it empties your battery in 20 minutes.

On my laptop Nouveau started to be an alternative after several years when development kept up and it got comparable performance and battery life to the proprietary drivers. But you might replace the laptop at that point. Waiting for NVidia or the open source drivers to keep up hasn’t been worth it for me in the past. I did that two times and everytime I had to live with the proprietary drivers instead.

So my advice is: Be comfortable using the proprietary drivers if you want to buy NVidia.

Intel Arc got really bad performance reviews. It’s not worth spending lots of money on them. But fortunately they’re cheap because the gamers don’t buy them (for that reason). I live with the iGPU that’s part of my CPU. It’s alright since I don’t play modern games anyways.

But you missed AMD. There are some laptops available with the Ryzen 7040 series and it seems to be a fast CPU. They also made the integrated graphics way faster than before, albeit probably still not on the level for proper gaming. But I bet there are desktop replacements out there that combine it with an AMD GPU.