| From: D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh(a)mimosa.com>
| I bought a used notebook which came with an Nvidia GPU and I haven't
| managed to get it to work with Fedora.
Sorry, that was a bad summary. I have not been able to get it to work
WELL with Fedora. I'm still hopeful.
- it hangs with the nouveau driver. (Which it tries to use unless you
suppress it with a kernel parameter.)
- it hangs the way I set it up with the negativo17 repo's packaging of the
proprietary nvidia driver.
- both hangs are so hard that they destroys the evidence of why the system
hung.
- it burns power when I use the Intel IGPU driver (by suppressing any
use of the nvidia hardware). The reason it burns power is that the
nvidia hardware is still powered up.
As another datapoint, it has been easy to get it to work well with
Ubuntu 19.10 (not my preferred distro). It seems that Ubuntu's third
party proprietary driver installer knows its stuff. Using the new-ish
"nvidia prime" "on-demand" feature I can get the nvidia hardware
properly shut
down for normal use. The fan on the notebook is now silent while I'm
composing this email. As a bonus, it can be turned on for selected tasks.
I suspect that with enough skill and determination I will be able to
duplicate this result on Fedora 31. But so far I have wasted a lot of
time without success.
I still like and support the Fedora project's approach to proprietary
code. It just pinches sometimes.