On the face of it, my old work laptop should be perfect for Linux. It’s Intel based, drivers are very mature, it has a hefty CPU, 16 GB RAM and a zippy SSD. It was a beast in its day, and it should be able to re-live its glory days as a Fedora box.
My problem is Fedora has moved away from x11 and gone all-in on wayland. But the GeForce 650M GPU this thing shiped with is no longer supported by Nvidia drivers. I need to use the 470 version, which doesn’t seem to work with wayland.
Has anyone gotten akmod-nvidia-470xx/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx working on Fedora 42? Would I have better luck trying a XFCE spin and installing KDE onto that?
UPDATE 24 Hours Later:
I had mostly answered my question with the idea of changing to the XFCE spin. I wiped it and reinstalled that spin which loads LightDM and an x11 environment. I got it working with that starting point. The irony is: I think I may have actually got there on the old spin also - for some reason the 6.16.9-200.fc42.x86_64 kernel won’t display the LUKS prompt with those 470 drivers loaded. I thought it just wasn’t booting. I’ll never know now.
It’s still a bit glitchy, but I think I’ll sort the remaining issues out. Sometimes when something calls OpenGL, the display goes glitchy, but loading nvidia-settings restores things.
It will default to the Nouveau driver which will be fine for daily driving, just not gaming.
Yes, it is fine with nouveau. But I want to play a few older games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 on it.
Well XWayland will for work fine with that driver version, but it’s 13 years old at this point. They’ve dropped support in the Nvidia drivers for anything that old, and any kernel upgrades do not guarantee that old 470 driver will continue to work.
May just be time to move on if this the major concern.
Try an external GPU?
Or have you tried gaming on nouveau?
When I’m at home, I have a beefy desktop that I can play modern games on. I’m going away for two weeks at Christmas and want to have some simple games to relax with. I’m debating whether to take my MX 3S mouse, or something more portable. I’m not likely going to be able to justify an eGPU.
Besides, the laptop only has Thunderbolt 1 with theoretical max throughput of 10gbps. I doubt I’d get much better than a RX560 going on it - which while supported isn’t really worth the effort. Now that I think about it, I could pick up a second-hand Thinkpad x280 for around the same price and be in a far better spot. That was actually my starting point, I was going to grab one of them before I decided to stretch the life out of this laptop.
Don’t u have internal graphics of Intel? About nvidia yeah u stuck to x11 switch distro or yeah switch something like fedora cinnamon spin.Actually mint can be nice option here
disable nvidia and run it off HD4000, plenty powerful for most tasks. you lose the display out and gain a better laptop with way better battery economy. you can leave X11 behind and use wayland without any issues - libinput gestures, HiDPI scaling, etc.
you also need the wakeup systemd scripts so it doesn’t hang for a minute while waking.
edit: I see you want to game on the thing, can’t help you there.
You say that like an i7 with 16GB RAM, and a GeForce GPU can’t game. The hardware is more than good enough (within reason - these are 15+ year old games). It works fine in Windows 10. Normally Linux support for older drivers is better than Windows; Nvidia is the exception.
I fired up a little test with Terraria and it worked, though that one likely would have worked under nouveau. I’ll do a more solid test during the week.
I had that machine so I know what I’m talking about. A 13 year old machine with anemic cooling and lead-free solder issues (GMUX crapping out) that heats up like a motherfucker is not something to game on. So it’s not a question of “can” but “should”. Then again, it’s your laptop, do what you want.
I had that machine so I know what I’m talking about.
Ahh - that’s how you knew about the HDMI-out issue. That one isn’t a problem for me as my screens are attached to my desktop these days. I disagree that this thing can’t play games though - it had 4000+ hours of gaming in its past under Windows, and worked flawlessly as a Windows 10 machine until last month. It is showing its age, but its weakness has always been that GPU. I’d never have bought it as a gaming machine: I bought it for work and games was a nice bonus.
I have owned this thing since the day it came out and for a decade it was my primary ‘everything’ machine. I’ve lugged across oceans and to dozens of client sites until I changed jobs to one that didn’t need a laptop any longer. I’m very familiar with it and know what it is capable of. It can get warm, yes, but it isn’t like I actually play with it on my lap. I could reinstall Windows on it and have it playing those games again, but I’d much prefer Fedora. This is a driver support issue, specifically a closed-source vendor choosing both not to support it and to refuse to open up their source so others can support it. It is not a problem with the hardware.
Have you checked on COPR and RPMFusion?
