Fedora's Power Tweaks Dropped The Power Use On A ThinkPad By ~30%

[cj.wijtmans]

All I can say is: get fucked with your corporate shilling. If you think it's a matter of unwillingness that everything is broken on non-Windows OSes, you're more stupid than you sound.

i aint shilling bruh. MY windows 10 laptop with iGPU and running games on my dGPU without doing anything is what i dreamed of doing on my older gentoo box. It was always a waste switching to dGPU in UEFI instead of just doing it properly, using my hardware the way it is supposed to work. Things like GLVND and EGLStreams would make that work perfectly. Whether you use nvidia or not. Its the linux (desktop) community shilling for their own non cross platform junk that works like shit. And if the kernel keeps declining in server performance i will ditch linux all together. Fragmenting developer work with the whole mir / wayland / amd / nvidia debacle is the worst thing to happen i wont look back until their shit actually works. And yeah i hate windows 10 for its shitty update policy, shitty configuration with registry, shitty privacy etc. But if you can look past that winows 10 is a solid OS for regular desktop an office work. The only reason i actually use windows is because i need it for some work (only half because the other more important half involves linux work) And i was hella surprised when i used windows 10

[polarathene]

Qualcomm/Atheros cards have an open wifi driver that works great too.

Yeah I think so, but only some iirc are good quality. At least I'm pretty sure I had an Atheros wifi or nic that had some driver issue, it was fine back a few kernels but something was changed that had affected it. I remember with a NIC that there was something about power state being stuck and only possible to resolve by changing a setting in Windows, nothing on linux was able to do this to my surprise, I had done lengthy debug and education about NICs trying to.

Don't. eGPUs on laptops are flaky even on Windows, where they are supposed to "just work".

Get a laptop with a decent iGPU for pure laptop work, and for anything requiring an actual dedicated GPU build a mini-itx system.

It depends from the level of retarded at which the UEFI firmware is. In a laptop it's more likely to not let you choose the external GPU as primary so you won't be able to use it easily.

Again, don't. A decent AMD APU is better than any low-end dGPU, and even an i3-i7 Intel iGPU is good enough for light gaming on a laptop.

A low-end dGPU is just wasting the battery for nothing, and causing headaches when switching.

Can you describe how it's flakey? AMD seems to be fine with eGPU support on their cards via Windows XConnect, and macOS support is much improved with the current beta. I'm not sure about the status of it on Linux but I assume that will improve with time. If the laptop has good IOMMU groups and virtualization extensions enabled(my previous MSI did, but the nvidia dGPU was optimus and wired into the iGPU framebuffer causing issues), I could pass the thunderbolt host controller to a guest VM with Windows or macOS, or just dual boot.

I do like to game but I'm not particularly interested in investing in a laptop for gaming, I did that with my previous laptop purchase(860M i7 4770HQ), while not top of the line it was heavy/bulky, heated up easily getting noisy due to fan, and short battery life. It'd be better to avoid all those issues if a bulk of that is caused by the GPU by having eGPU support where I can connect my 1070 into an enclosure over TB3 to get GPU power when needed. eGPU appealed to me as it's usually the GPU that I want to upgrade, by having it separate from the laptop internals, I don't have to replace the laptop.

AFAIK the only limitations are the x4 PCIe lanes of bandwidth vs x8/x16 you'd usually get(at least on a desktop, not sure if some laptop models lack x16 lanes even for dGPU), that said eGPU apparently is limited to 22Gbps of the 32Gbps TB3 can offer, a cap/limit Intel enforces so the 10Gbps can be used for I/O like USB for some reason..I could see that potentially being an issue with some workloads like gaming at certain quality/resolution, but for my compute workloads it's not always a bottleneck I'd have to worry about, making eGPU rather convenient until I can later afford a decent workstation with a ThreadRipper or EPYC.

A mITX system I get is similar size to an eGPU enclosure, but then requires additional mouse/keyboard and display. I'd argue that's not as portable for taking with me during travelling. I'm actually going to be in another country for several months where it's not too affordable to bring my desktop machine with me, I'd assume the weight of a mITX system is going to be greater as well, not sure how it compares but I'd rather avoid any issues in regards to luggage/carry-on weight limits. For stationary work mITX would be better, but I'm not sure if it'd offer much benefits over a larger desktop machine?

The AMD dGPU as low-end was to avoid other issues cited above about the high-end models, wasn't particularly for gaming but general Linux/DE experience, have had issues with nvidia. The AMD APUs are limited to 4 cores, I thought maybe I'd be able to get more cores and just have a dGPU paired with that, but I've since learned that AMD doesn't have TB3 support currently, so that'd leave Coffee Lake which comes with iGPU.

[polarathene]

All i could say is get a windows 10 laptop. You can switch profiles and customize profiles easily. Also GPU switching with nvidia works really well. The OS works on the iGPU and whenever i launch a game its using the dGPU automagically, or you can run it like that manually if you wish. As much as i dislike microsoft and nvidia in general, their shit just works properly. I cant say that for the linux desktop. Linux "community" likes to hate on anything nvidia thus EGLStreams and GLVND. Even though its exactly what linux desktop needs.

Well the purchase is likely to come with Windows 10 for sure I had a bad experience with Windows randomly deciding to corrupt it's bootloader, took 3 days to figure out what caused it. It was a random chance during shutdown/restart due to fast boot(or whatever the windows specific one, not bios/uefi is called)... I just got unlucky.

Not a big fan of other Windows 10 issues myself, have used Win 10 at work and it is rather nice. Not so great for some other things which require a bunch of manual effort and compiling to use some software that'd otherwise be a breeze on Linux. Haven't looked at WSL, maybe using a package manager via that or Docker would resolve most of those issues. One was to use Docker with nvidia GPU for deep learning, the Windows Docker support doesn't support this, might be possible via WSL not sure.

I don't hate on nvidia personally, but there are some areas where due to the proprietary driver, you have graphical issues on DEs like KDE that can only be resolved on the driver end. AMD has gotten much better(not so much the case back in 2008 when I started with Linux) and seems to be a solid choice on Linux instead, later this year it'll start being quite nice for compute work too, some software is Windows only with CUDA only support however, can't do much about that. GLVND is great, server side GLVND is good too, I understand issues with community with EGLStreams, less fragmentation would be better, looking forward to nvidia's new solution/approach.

i aint shilling bruh. MY windows 10 laptop with iGPU and running games on my dGPU without doing anything is what i dreamed of doing on my older gentoo box.

Isn't that what Gnome now supports? Pretty sure I read that the iGPU and dGPU for apps is just meant to work like it does on Windows now offloading to dGPU without user intervention?

[cj.wijtmans]

Isn't that what Gnome now supports? Pretty sure I read that the iGPU and dGPU for apps is just meant to work like it does on Windows now offloading to dGPU without user intervention?

I think it supports GPU switching. But not running apps on dGPU while the desktop always works on iGPU. I could be wrong though. Also how much effort does it take to get the app running on the dGPU? On my intel/nvidia laptop it just works easily and flawlessy. I never used gnome so i could be wrong. But if i ever go to the linux desktop it will be gnome for sure.

[polarathene]

I think it supports GPU switching. But not running apps on dGPU while the desktop always works on iGPU. I could be wrong though. Also how much effort does it take to get the app running on the dGPU? On my intel/nvidia laptop it just works easily and flawlessy. I never used gnome so i could be wrong. But if i ever go to the linux desktop it will be gnome for sure.

When I had laptop with Optimus, I needed bumblebee setup and to run some command when launching an app to have it use the dGPU while desktop uses iGPU for anything else. Gnome added some feature after I had migrated to KDE and a desktop machine to handle that command in it's app launcher automatically afaik. For other DE there is some package you can install iirc that lets you maintain a list of programs that are whitelisted to run on dGPU and that should have a similar effect. The GLVND support makes it much easier to have working properly I think, I remember it being a pain on both Ubuntu and Antergos, Manjaro which I use now seems to make it effortless to support Optimus with their hardware manager frontend(not related to automatic dGPU for apps though).