Native Nvidia Optimus and Fedora 19

[Alexander Volovics]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 03:47:03PM +0200, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:

> I'm considering buying a laptop with Nvidia Optimus, and this looks really
> bad! Have you managed to fix this issue? Did you get Fedora 19 to install?
> Do Ubuntu and Linux Mint work better with Nvidia Optimus graphics?

I can't remember the content of the mail you are replying to, and
I am too lazy to look it up, but I suspect the problems were related
to Nvidia and it's blob.

I have an Optimus laptop and have been running it with either
vgaswitcheroo alone, bbswitch alone or bbswitch + bumblebee.
But then I only used these tools to switch off the discrete graphics
for power saving reasons.
I have no need of the capabilities of the Nvidia (don't play stupid
games for example).

At the moment I am using bbswitch+bumblebee because there are good
rpm's available for Fedora and this saves some small effort compiling
and installing yourself, see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee
And using bumblebee saves me some small extra work with respect to
systemd when using bbswitch alone.

If you are content to use the nouveau driver (and if it supports your
Nvidia card suficiently) I can advice these rpm's.
I don't know how good the actual 'switching' integrated-discrete works
because I don't use it (but a lot of other people do).
But the rpm's are good and the setup works perfectly (for me).

Fedora should install without problems on any laptop with supported
hardware (Optimus is no hinder).

The situation is no different on Ubuntu or Mint (everything works the
same as under Fedora) except that they might offer to setup bumblebee
for you at install (I can't remember). And again the nouveau option
might not give you what you want and the nvidia option might give you the
same 'blob' problems as under Fedora.  

If you want no hassle at all don't buy Optimus.

AV