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.
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.
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.