So i’m helping my best friend to try instaling nvidia gtx 1050 mobile drivers on his laptop, we genualy don’t know what to do and i can figure out how to make it work, so it would be very helpfull if someone could explain me what to do or provive me with a guide to make it work
If it ends up being Optimus, I’ve found optimus-manager-qt from the aur to be great. You don’t have to mess around with configs and you can make switching or setting to Nvidia permanently really easy with it
I’ve got a bit of experience with NVIDIA Optimus laptops on Linux so here’s some questions:
What exactly is the problem?
Are games not running on NVIDIA?
In this case you need to add an environment variable to the launch options in steam, the name of which has escaped me (should be on OPTIMUS page of Arch wiki)
Or is the driver not working at all?
What desktop environment/wm are they using?
For example if you’re using GNOME in the settings program in the about the system section (the last one) and in the System information dialog check to make sure it says something like “NVIDIA GTX 1050 Mobile”. Also make sure the NVIDIA driver program shows up with the other apps
While off-topic, I’m of the opinion that Arch only exists to support elitists which relates to the comment.
Arch isn’t always the most up to date
It isn’t very reliable
It doesn’t try to be any easier to use (won’t even work with GNOME software)
It’s not as straight forward to contribute to like, say, Void Linux which causes issues with burnt-out and busy maintainers
It installs the the bare minimum so stuff won’t always work
The only real benefit is you get a smaller install size (x86 only) and maybe some more customisablility.
But for some reason it gets treated like an ideal for every Linux user to reach. It’s supposedly like to going to the Olympics as an elite athlete. An Arch system needs more work to maintain, but there isn’t really much to gain
Every point you made is either patently false (isn’t up to date, won’t even work with gnome) or doesn’t make any sense (installs the bare minimum, so stuff won’t always work).
The only part we agree on is that arch isn’t for everyone.
I think he meant the application GNOME Software. Only valid point, I would like to be able to install or at least update my arch packages through GNOME Software like I do with flatpaks. Doesn’t have anything to do with the way Arch works tho, it’s just that no one has made a plugin yet that allows this.
Check on your laptop with dmesg | grep -i chipset the codename of your graphic card. With this you can check which driver is the best on wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA. There is a paragraph, explaining which driver is the best.
If I understand it right, the nvidia package is the correct one for 1050. So you can use pacman -S nvidia with root privileges. All dependencies should be resolved automatically.
I would recommend to reboot, in case there are changed kernel modules.
2 things i have to note: Using Wayland is a total mess with nvidia. Specially on Arch Linux. I have screen flickering in GUI and games, the performance is so lala and tools like KeePass which needs access to the text in window titles did not work complete. On Manjaro, the flickering doesn’t exist, but the other symptoms do. Maybe im missing some packages on Arch.
Second with Vulkan i have some tearing in games. I have not looked further in to that.
On the other hand, games like Satisfactory or Elder Scrolls Online, have more FPS with the same settings as on Windows.
Currently i test Arch and Manjaro in parallel on the same Laptop. But I tend to keep Manjaro and remove Arch. There are light pro’s and con’s, but overall, I’m more happy with Manjaro. But this has nothing to do with you’re issue.
We’re thinking in the possibility of using debian only for games, because he’s been using arch for almost a year and a half and he likes it very much, but we could prefer having the drivers working on arch directly for convenience
Why do you think Optimus is what you need? I run Arch with a 1050 and all I did was install the nvidia package and reboot.
Have you already tried that and run into issues?
Yes, he is been using arch for almost year and a half but he has never managed to make the drivers work, this pakage unfortunatley didn´t work neither when he tried himself or now while I’m trying to help him, thanks btw
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