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127 ◴[] No.45038436[source]
Just recently moved onto Linux. Most likely not coming back when these kind of things just keep happening. I'm really surprised how well everything works. 120Hz HDR 4k Nvidia no issues on Wayland. Kubuntu 25.04/Plasma 6.3 is very nice. EasyEffects/PipeWire makes audio better compared to Windows. Steam/Proton/Wine works very well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits. Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth I can't think of anything that's worse than Windows while many things are better.
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tombert ◴[] No.45040391[source]
I eventually did get it working, but man you are luckier than I getting Nvidia to have "no issues". I had to waste an entire weekend getting an Nvidia card working [1].

I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.

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kevin_thibedeau ◴[] No.45040605[source]
That situation is entirely of Nvidia's making.
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tombert ◴[] No.45040718[source]
No argument on that but regardless of whose fault it is, the end user has to deal with the consequences.
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trelane ◴[] No.45043317[source]
Only if you buy a Windows laptop and slap Linux on it.

Or is OSX bad because you can't put it on some random laptop off Amazon?

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tombert ◴[] No.45053184[source]
I didn't really assign labels of "good" or "bad"; in this case that's a matter of philosophy that I am wholly uninterested in.

I specifically said that I had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.

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trelane ◴[] No.45055442[source]
> had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.

Did you buy the laptop with the intention of running Linux on it?

Did it ship with Linux preinstalled?

Did the vendor support Linux running on that computer? Like, could you call them and get them to provide you help in the case of problems?

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1. tombert ◴[] No.45057622{3}[source]
It wasn't a laptop, it was a tiny gaming box. I did buy it with the intention of running Linux on it, and it actually worked great with the vanilla setup with the AMD CPU + GPU. I did do research before I bought it to make sure the drivers should work.

I already had an Nvidia GPU and an eGPU case that I had bought for previous projects with AI (on Linux, but headless). I wanted to use it to play some games that are a bit too intense for the little gaming box (specifically the System Shock remake from 2023).

It's mentioned in the blog post, but getting the eGPU case and getting Nvidia stuff working with regular Gnome wasn't too bad on Linux, only took a few hours. The biggest issue was that I wanted to use the SteamOS interface and that was completely corrupted with the stable Nvidia driver. I had to move to the beta driver and it's still a little broken, but usable. The games themselves work fine.

I also had a lot of issues with audio getting increasingly scratchy as I played, to a point of being completely unusable after about an hour, and that required a lot of trial and error but eventually I was able to search my way through NixOS docs and figure it out.

The card was already two years old so I doubt I could have gotten much support from it, and I am even more skeptical that Nvidia's tech support would have known how to do anything with NixOS.