this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
224 points (96.7% liked)
Technology
88390 readers
3242 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Don't wait for the next laptop, just install Linux now.
It sounds like your laptop is completely unusable anyway, and you can dual boot while you're figuring out if everything works
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.
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.
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.