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Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker - techemails.com (www.techemails.com)

submitted 3 days ago by lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Thorry@feddit.org 6 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I have a laptop from work that runs Windows 11 and have the same experience with the unusable start menu. I wasn't allowed to install Linux on the machine. I run Linux on every other machine I have and have used Linux since the 90s.

However after complaining and begging with IT I was allowed to try running Linux on it. It's a managed machine, so I had to do a dual boot from a second drive IT installed for me. If it worked out and IT was happy, I could run Linux.

Unfortunately it was a total failure. The big issue is the CPU is AMD and has on-board graphics that are normally used for everything. However there is also a Nvidia GPU, I think an RTX Pro, which is used for acceleration stuff. In Windows this works well enough, the AMD handles most of the regular display stuff and is plenty powerful for that. The Nvidia gets used to offload certain workloads, to make sure the laptop is usable for certain kinds of software. On Linux this is a configuration that simply isn't supported or working at all. Either it just won't boot or do graphics at all or it's extremely slow and/or unstable or with some effort the Nvidia chip can be completely disabled and just the AMD is used. Basically turning a $2500 laptop into a $1000 one and unable to run certain workloads. Now getting some of that software to run would be hard anyways, as it's not typical software and only supported on certain versions of Windows. But I hadn't even gotten to that stage.

The whole experience reminded me of getting Linux to run on my laptop back in 2002. An unstable mess with half the features missing. Back then I loved the challenge and when I finally got the thing to ping over the PCMCIA wifi card I was super happy. Never did get the sound working on that laptop tho.

Obviously I aborted the experiment and have just accepted Windows 11. It's fucking awful and I bitch about it every time I need to use that machine. But for now, there doesn't seem to be a better option.

[–] dan@upvote.au 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I'm surprised they let you dual boot a managed machine, since the Linux installation likely isn't running any of their management software. At my work, we're not allowed to dual-boot, but at least they support Fedora. (their production servers use CentOS and Fedora is close enough that they can reuse a lot of management infrastructure like Chef recipes across both)

See if there's a setting in the BIOS to always use the Nvidia graphics. It'll use more power but should be more reliable.

Hybrid graphics is notoriously buggy on Linux, especially reverse PRIME. Reverse PRIME is used when the video output port on the laptop (DisplayPort, HDMI, whatever) is physically wired to the discrete GPU, but the system is the integrated GPU. There's a well-known bug with reverse PRIME where the screen only updates at 1fps when only using an external monitor (laptop screen is disabled).

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah it took some doing on the part of IT. It was only possible using a separate drive and special settings on their part. That way it could be fully managed, but still allow for the dual boot.

Alas the AMD can't be disabled and the Nvidia card can't do display output. It's one of those RTX Pro things that are purely used for compute, not driving a display.

[–] tux7350@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Yeah, its known that setting up an nvidia card is notoriously hard on linux. I believe Linus T had something nice to say about them. But what you're looking for does exist and can be setup with a little bit of tinkering.

Personally, I use NixOS, so I just have to add a few lines of code to my nix flake. Here are the directions

Then you just add an environment variable for the applications you want to run. If you don't use Nix and want to set it up manually, as always the Arch Wiki comes into play. See section 1.3.1.2.

To sum that up, install the nvidia drivers through the package manger, mod probe the kernel, and add some udev rules. You'll need to add those environment variables again for any application you want to use the gpu.

Edit: I forgot to mention its called Nvidia Prime. If you search the distro of your choice plus that it should help.

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Nvidia itself is fine, as long as you don't also have an AMD gpu. My main rig runs a Nvidia card and it's just fine. I use Arch btw

[–] tux7350@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

My laptop says otherwise lol and because you didnt read the links I put

services.xserver.videoDrivers = [
    "amdgpu"
    "nvidia"
  ];
hardware.nvidia.prime = {
    offload = {
      enable = true;
      enableOffloadCmd = true;
    };
    # Make sure to use the correct Bus ID values for your system!
    nvidiaBusId = "PCI:0:2:0";
    amdgpuBusId = "PCI:54:0:0";
  };

Is all it takes to install Nvidia Prime Offloading on a NixOS machine with AMD iGPU and an Nvidia dGPU.

[–] dan@upvote.au 3 points 3 days ago

Nvidia isn't too bad these days, especially for 20 series and newer since they switched to using the "open-source" driver by default. It's mainly PRIME that's the problem (where you have both onboard graphics and a discrete GPU and the system has to switch between them), and the problems aren't exclusive to Nvidia.

[–] OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, I had similar problems years ago.

Realistically, that is primarily gamer hardware, and Nvidia has no interest in open sourcing their drivers, or gamers nowadays, so it's unlikely to ever be fixed.

Most people don't have a spare thousand dollar gpu on their laptop though, and for them this is not an issue.

[–] ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

they did in fact open source their drivers and I haven't had problems with Nvidia cards on Linux since years

[–] OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Partially open sourced with heavy reliance on binary blobs and closed source user space code.

And yeah, we're talking explicitly about Optimus switching being bad, nothing else.

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago

All engineers have those cards in their laptops, it's very common. Those aren't for gaming, they are required to run a lot of the more advanced engineering software.