When will Nvida offer proper Linux support for optimus notebooks?

I regret buying my optimus notebook with Nvidia GeForce 730M. I’ve been strugling for the past 3 years to use Linux, without any success. Today was the first time I could fully use the hardware I bought, on Xubuntu 14.04. But Linux support is still far from satisfactory, compared to Windows support. I have huge performance drops when using other Desktop Environments than XFCE (gnome, cinnamon, mate…). Also, Ubuntu is the only distro that currently nvidia-prime works. But even on Ubuntu, Nvidia/Intel switch is not dynamic as in Windows. You either have to work 100% of the time using Intel or logout/login to work 100% of the time using Nvidia. This is unbearable. Linux users don’t have proper hardware support for more than 3 years already. When will Nvida offer proper Linux support for optimus notebooks?

Why haven’t you mentioned/tried Bumblebee?

For two reasons. First, Bumblebee is not Nvidia’s support for Linux users. It’s a desperate attitude made by unpaid hobbyists. And second, because it’s terrible and offers horrendous performance. It’s not intended to be the definitive solution for optimus notebooks, it’s merely a temporary workaround while Nvidia doesn’t provide proper Linux support for the optimus technology. Hence, I’m here to ask when will Nvidia offer proper Linux support for optimus notebooks.

Well, the GPL isn’t helping :-(

Source: Fedora Workstation Next Steps: Wayland and Graphics | Christian F.K. Schaller

So it looks like NVIDIA is working closely together with Red Hat (employees many people working on Gnome and Fedora) to get this working. EGLDevice and EGLStreams are also proposals made by NVIDIA.

Thanks for the update. It’s sad to know that even after 3 years Linux still has no support for optimus technology. If I knew this before buying, I would never buy an optimus notebook. I regret so much.

Read my topic and you’ll understand.

So… do we have any progress?

Never unless they open source their drivers which I don’t see happening any time soon.

Everyone’s beloved AMD did not open source their proprietary drivers, instead they hired open source devs to create new drivers which do not expose their trade secrets and such.

I’m pretty much in the same boat of regret with my Sager NP8658S (Clevo P650RG) w/4k screen. I don’t even care about Optimus features, but the newer drivers don’t work at all with however the vendors wired these things.

At the time I bought this laptop I loved my past nVidia experiences and thought that people who couldn’t get the drivers working just weren’t trying hard enough. This laptop worked fine on day one with the newest drivers. Then a year in, as nVidia released newer and newer drivers, they completely broke compatibility with the hardware post 364.19. Even in Discrete mode where nVidia is the only active GPU, it will fail to find the screen.

I’ve spent literally 100’s of hours trying everything I could: Every new driver version, every conceivable XOrg conf, newer XOrg versions, kernel parameters, without prime in Discrete mode, with prime in MSHybrid/Optimus mode, with and without bumblebee (which I’d used on previous laptops with no problems). Tons of bug-reports uploaded here… all to no avail.

This has become a hassle, as the 364 drivers don’t work with newer kernels and newer XOrg.

Along the way I’ve bumped into others having the same problem with the same hardware and our conclusion has been that no drivers made in the last 2 YEARS work with this hardware and nVidia abandoned us Linux users when the chip-set was still relatively new. Worse yet, the chip-set’s still so new that Nouveau doesn’t support it. So I’m still here, checking every new release and uploading new bug-reports hoping against hope.

I’ll definitely be looking at AMD chips first in my next leading edge laptop, now that they seem to have come up with performant alternatives.

From what I’ve read on GeForce Forums, nVidia graphics drivers are customized by notebook makers to meet power management goals that are specific to each model or range of models.

Plenty of notebook users have encountered problems when trying to upgrade to newer nVidia graphics drivers that are not supported by their notebook’s manufacturer:

GeForce Forums
[url]https://forums.geforce.com/search/more/sitecommentsearch/notebook%20gpu%20drivers/[/url]

Plenty of notebook users have encountered problems when trying to upgrade to newer nVidia graphics drivers that are not supported by their notebook’s manufacturer

When newer Windows drivers continue to work on the same hardware and newer Linux drivers don’t, it’s not the fault of the laptop manufacturer.