These days I was wondering what laptop GPU would be the easiest to maintain / simplest to configure from a laptop POV?
Considering NixOS (I see Nix as gentoo++) or arch.
Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?
Would prefer open source but am not Uber passionate (results > means).
Fictional use case is mid tier game development - ray tracing is nice but stability and minimal effort to keep stable while pushing decent amounts shader/polygons is more important vs peak perf/px. No bitbro / artificial guess.
Experiences & recommendos?
I am not sure I want to sign this. I went for a full AMD laptop and the APU sucks balls. Up until a few linux versions ago, it would randomly lock up when a lot of video streams were on the screen. So whenever I was in a Google Meet, I could roll a dice if I have to hard-reset the machine or not. That seems to be fixed now, or I was lucky for the last few weeks.
Then when an external dual-monitor setup goes to sleep, waking up completely restarts X11 or Wayland - doesn’t matter which, they are both affected. So whenever I am in the office where I have that setup, I have to remember to disable any energy saving settings, otherwise I lose my open session every time I go for a coffee.
I never had any such problems on my machines with NVidia or Intel. So for integrated graphics, I would prefer Intel over AMD.
Not denying your experience, but the thing with comments like this is that it’s very anecdotal. There’s a lot of variables potentially at play here, ranging from the model of your APU/laptop, the DE you’re using, the display server, the kernel, the distro, the codecs you’ve installed etc, so it’s really hard to place the blame squarely on “AMD”.
But since we’re being anecdotal, I’d also like to say I haven’t experienced any such issues with my AMD laptop + APU. FWIW, here’s my full setup: