- Price: 370$
- Model: Asus ROG Strix G15 (G531GV)
- CPU: Intel I7 9th Gen
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
- Ram: 16GB
- Storage: Samsung SSD 980 Pro 1TB (NVME)
2060, 9th gen and 1Tb SSD for 400 is a good deal in my opinion. Don’t fear the nvidia BS spreaded here, with an up to date distro, it is no problem
I use my 780 with endeavourOS and latest proprietary driver without issues. I had to switch some packages from the nauvau edition to the nvidia editions. (Vulcan and cuda stuff)
In kde settings about page you can easily check if vulcan is running good
The main limitation of Nvidia gpu’s is you can’t use Wayland on most WM’s (you can on Ubuntu, but then you’re using Ubuntu)
Nvidia GPUs*
I think since version 550 of the proprietary driver, it is mostly possible, if your card is compatible (meaning not legacy), but yea, I as well have to switch ch to X.org for some things. (Proton Cyberpunk, for example)
For legacy cards, the open source driver are most of the time best bet, if you are not running a legacy kernel since nvidia does not update those anymore (there are community patches of legacy proprietary driver to make them work on newer kernel, but they often have less features than using the card with nouveau)
NVIDIA drivers are notoriously bad. They break and WILL depreciate your card eventually, forcing you to switch to the slow open source drivers.
I have had two cards lose support. It’s absurd.
But for 370 it’s kinda a steal honestly.
It’s 2000 series, so they are supported by the new OSS driver, no?
Yes, but for how long?
Probably still for some time. I have a laptop with a NVIDIA Optimus 1050ti from 2016 or so and it’s still going strong 8 years later. It starts getting a bit tricky (but not impossible) at 10+ years old cards
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I would love to here more info about your issue, I bet there was just a misunderstanding 😇
I have Nvidia gt210 in office, and latest Linux mint installed, no proprietary drivers for my GPU is installable, they exist, yes, but you can’t install them on latest Linux mint
That seems like old nvidia card (shortly googled). For those, nvidia deserves all the fuck you it gets 😂 they don’t offer proprietary drivers for legacy card on newer kernel. For most, there exist community patched versions, but nouveau is often more feature rich (and works with wayland!). Many legacy nvidia cards require you to boot from legacy BiOS and won’t work from UEFI -> is is especially infuriating on old Mac, since those need to boot from a CD in order to be able to easily install Linux using legacy bios (there are ways to convert a EFI install, but I, till now, always failed that approach…). At least, as soon as you have grub2 and legacy bios set up, you can use grub to boot feom a iso file on your harddisk without switching back to EFI)
This card in the laptop is not legacy and even “works” with wayland on proprietary drivers
Thank you for your reply) most of the negative opinions people have about proprietary drivers is exactly this, they become obsolete, open source drivers on the other hand, does not, you and me agree on this, love your positive outlook on everything, feels refreshing, thank you)
❤️
I’d tell them to knock 50-70 off for the condition of the surfaces. No idea about the model and specs or if that’s worth it but that’s an ugly case on it and I would be grossed out using it, would probably have to tape a sheet of paper over the worn out spots to be comfortable touching that surface.
My laptop, similar Taiwanese brand, is fairly new and already beginning to look like this. I don’t know why they have to be such cheapskates with the crappy fake metal finish. Somehow we can find enough aluminum to make disposable Coke cans out of it but it’s too expensive for a laptop casing.
What model?
It sounds like a really cheap model.
Model and price is unimportant. But if metal’s too expensive and they can’t do a fake chrome finish that doesn’t wear off in 5 minutes then then they should just stick to white or black.
If there’s nothing wrong beyond the hideous consmetic damage sure.
Some distros have some very specific images like this one that I would install if I had the same computer:
Did someone spraypaint this before removing stickers from it? Because if that is the case hell yea buy it. You will never agaín find a laotop with such style ever again. Especially at that price.
Nvidia and Linux don’t play well. Also if you are able to add a little bit more I bought a new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 14" with a AMD Ryzen processor and without Windows but instead there was FreeDOS preinstalled for $440.
I just installed linux on it and everything worked perfectly for 3 years now, I’m very happy with it. It’s not the most powerful, so I can’t edit videos on it, but I can play Minecraft, I can program, use the browser with all Microsoft 350 stuff and so on without any problems.
@ColdWater specs?
Solid device
However, your battery life is going to be like 2 minutes
This
Gaming laptops usually have atrocious battery life, especially ones with Intel i9s and comparatively weak GPUs. Means they put the whole budget of the laptop into the CPU and nothing else.
My i7 8th gen 32gb 1060 MSI g65 stealth with a brand new battery gets 45minutes - 3 hours depending on what I’m doing…it’s atrocious.
I main a 1135g7 32gb dell latitude and that seems to be in the happy range of 3hrs-5hrs 3hrs being the more more common time. As much as I hate the plastic package I really go love the 1135g7 processor. Dell just sucks at making good hardware.
That’s a good deal for this laptop and while Nvidia sucks on Linux (you’ll have some support issues), that graphics card isn’t the worst offender.
Tldr yes buy and install Linux. You’ll have to tinker for the graphics card though.
For that price I’d buy it myself
How often do you write the word “wads”? I can see a potential problem.
ht o you men? You cn typ jut fine ith keybor like tht.
it’s wrs with dvrk
lthugh vwls r lss imprtnt
They’re a huge fan of doom mods and level packs.
They’re clear keycaps.
I genuinely didn’t realise that! It looked like they were missing, and just had the little nubs underneath.
Would you perhaps like to imagine they were missing, if only for the sake of my previous comment? :)
There’s a lot of naysayers in here with ideas born out of fashion advice similar to the “if it tastes good, it’s bad for you” crowd. That laptop is a fantastic deal so long as it’s all in one piece! Nvidia has shaky driver support, but you’ll be fine.
Gaming laptops have some of the worst builds. They break down very easily. This is why people go for Thinkpads and Elitebooks. I think that you can get yourself a 7th/8th gen Thinkpad Pxy, P1 or X1 Extreme series with a gDPU, and that would be a better deal - but do remember, they all have Nvidia dGPUs. And if you don’t really need a dGPU, then there’s the Thinkpad T series with the Ryzen processor.
Actually I kinda need a good GPU without destroying my bank account, I already have an IdeaPad1 R3 7th gen running Arch currently
I don’t know what your use-case is, but as I’ve said before, you should look into these Thinkpad models:
2018:
- P52s
- P52
- P72
- P1 Gen 1
- X1 Extreme Gen 1
2019:
- P53s
- P53
- P73
- P1 Gen 2
- X1 Extreme Gen 2
2020:
- P15 Gen 1
- P15s Gen 1
- P15v Gen 1
- P17 Gen 1
- P1 Gen 3
- X1 Extreme Gen 3
All of them have the option of GPU. Make sure to ask for the relevant machine type or part number to validate if they really have what’s inside of them - use that information to check on PSREF. Try to get at least a hexacore PC with more than or equal to 16GB of RAM. Avoid soldered RAM if possible - some of the newer ones that I’ve mentioned have them - because that way, you’ll end up having to use RAM in Flex mode.
why not a desktop? you get more performance for the price and you don’t need to worry as much about nvidia power management, which seems like a pain from what I’ve seen
Don’t have space for it and I’m concern about power consumption
Honestly I think the power bills would be similar with similar performance hardware, because you have to take into account battery losses with laptops.
that’s fair that you don’t have the space though
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What a terrible generalization based on pure fashion.
Older, out of support, nvidia drivers tend to break from time to time.
I’m pretty sure it will be supported for more than a couple of years, my 930m (not even mx) is still receiving the latest driver updates
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Noted, but do you have any laptop model in mind that reasonably cheap and has a good AMD dGPU because it’s pretty rare and I can’t think of anything on top of my head
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Steamdeck is expensive like 2X the price, because they’re imported and not officially available in my country
Integrated GPU is not a dirty word anymore.
AMD’s system-on-a-chips with RDNA2/3 pack almost the same punch as the discrete cards with the same architecture. See steamdeck as the prime example, but there’s quite a few boards, boxes and laptops with the same.
If that’s the prime example you’re holding up to an RTX 2060, I’d hate to see a subprime example.
Sorry but could you please elaborate. I’ve been using nvidia forever in linux machines both at work and at home. I work in AI so using nvidia gpus is a must. Maybe there’s something that I missed but my experience has been pretty solid so far.
At home I am using openSUSE tumbleweed KDE wayland and at work ubuntu headless.
These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)
Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.
Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.
Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.
Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.
Finally, thanks for the clear cut answer. I don’t have any experience with training on AMD but the errors from nvidia are usually very obscure.
As for using gpus other than nvidia, there’s a slew of problems. Mostly that on cloud where most of the projects are deployed, our options seem either limited to nvidia gpus, or cloud tpus.
Each AI experiment can cost usually in thousands of dollars and use a cluster of GPUs. We have built and modified our system for fully utilizing such an environment. I can’t even imagine shifting to Amd gpus at this point. The amount of work involved and the red tape shudder
Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.
By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.
The only two things that have ever been broken by an update for me are hyprland and Nvidia drivers, multiple times
Even then that seems to have stopped happening recently though they patched one of the reallg big issues this year
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Do you mean in terms of gaming? I admit that I don’t do much gaming on linux. Usually just development and browsing.
I also use proprietary nvidia drivers if that makes a difference.
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Yeah, Tumbleweed has a good track record with NVIDIA drivers in my experience. As with updates in general.
Although I still use X11 as Wayland still has graphical issues in some apps for me. Usually Flatpaks. That makes it unusable for me for the time being.
Edit: I have an older card (1050ti), so maybe I don’t get the latests drivers anymore?? On version 550.
Ah the problem you are describing in wayland actually usually happens only with electron apps. Most of the electron apps require forcing them to run on wayland. They are usually running on X (x-wayland) which cause all sorts of glitches. You can use xeyes to check if the app is using xwayland or not. If eyes move when you move the cursor inside the app then it’s on xwayland.
To resolve the issues for the electron apps I pass these parameters:
--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=waylandGetting these args to flatpacks could be a bit tricky. You can usually find Appimages that can allow you to run these apps easily on wayland.
I am also on ver 550.120 so doubt that driver is the issue here.
😂i need to fix element (matrix client) with that 🥳 finally got the cause of the issue
Thank you very much!
How could that be fixed by the devs? Is it something electron has to update or all electron apps individually, in order for it to work out of box?
![[Solved] Sorry if this not related to this community because I don't know where to ask, but should I buy this laptop? and does it play nice with Linux.](https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/a4dfcf61-653f-46ae-bcc4-c3608b2bc33f.jpeg){kind=link}