Ask Slashdot: Best Laptop With Decent Linux Graphics Support?

jcreus writes "After struggling for some years with Nvidia cards (the laptop from which I am writing this has two graphic cards, an Intel one and Nvidia one, and is a holy mess [I still haven't been able to use the Nvidia card]) and, encouraged by Torvalds' middle finger speech, I've decided to ditch Nvidia for something better. I am expecting to buy another laptop and, this time, I'd like to get it right from the start. It would be interesting if it had decent graphics support and, in general, were Linux friendly. While I know Dell has released a Ubuntu laptop, it's way off-budget. My plan is to install Ubuntu, Kubuntu (or even Debian), with dual boot unfortunately required." So: what's the state of the art for out-of-the-box support?

Comments

It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Hsien-Ko]

Intel.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Tough Love]

Well, AMD is looking good too, with currently shipping Fusion parts for laptops all being Evergreen or Northern Islands, both supported by the open source xorg Radeon driver, with a few exceptions such as full screen antialiasing, which seems to be getting close but currently requires the Catalyst driver. See here for the current xorg driver state. Notice that everything you need for 2D and 3D graphics is there, up to but not including Southern Islands. Just taking a quick look around, it looks like the latest budget AMD laptops are Trinity, which is Northern Islands, which should work fine with the current Xorg driver. But definitely google the specific chipset. Power management... good question. I'm getting solid results with Ivy Bridge, I haven't tried AMD's laptop parts recently.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[marcansoft]

Which means the Optimus solution isn't actually all that bad. I have the opposite viewpoint: I bought an Optimus laptop assuming the nvidia wouldn't work, simply for the other specs and the Intel video. When it turned out that bumblebee worked fairly painlessly and I was able to use the nvidia to accelerate 3D while the Intel drove my displays, I was pleasantly surprised. The solution is a bit of a hack, but honestly, I don't really have anything bad to say about it. It's the best of both worlds: open Intel drivers which are stable and support modern interfaces like XRandR 1.3 and KMS driving the displays, and the clunky proprietary but fast nvidia driver sandboxed in its own backgrond X server doing 3D acceleration only.

Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but

[Thumper_SVX]

I came here to pretty much say this. I actually got an Alienware M11XR2 for free (it was purchased by my work for an executive who decided he hated it, and nobody else wanted such a small laptop so it was given to me as a play box). I stuck Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it, installed Bumblebee after a bit of research and it works fantastically well. I play FlightGear and Diaspora on it frequently, and just got into the Steam for Linux beta. I haven't had any issues with it at all.

While I agree it's not an optimal solution (groan... oh the pun, the pun!) it works really well. I have just modified the launchers in my start menu to call /usr/bin/optirun when I have a 3D accelerated app installed. Just for the record I run Gnome-Shell instead of Unity because I seriously can't stand it, and editing the menu items is easier.

Interestingly, that extra step is really not that different to what I do on my Windows laptop which has a newer Optimus chipset (Dell E6430); more often than not I have to go and modify the launchers in the start menu to make sure they use the Optimus chipset to run instead of the Intel. Although I do also use the Nvidia control panel for that.

Hmm... maybe all that's missing is a control panel item for Bumblebee... I might have to break out my Python/GTK skills and throw one together :)

I, for one

[Black Parrot]

welcome our new middle-finger-brandishing overlord.

System76: Good support

[CajunArson]

System76 gives good support. They aren't the cheapest option out there though.

If your goal is not to play 3D games, then Intel HD graphics have by far the best open-source support and HD 4000 graphics are actually pretty good overall. If your goal is to play games, then Nvidia or AMD with proprietary drivers will be your best bet, with the edge in driver quality going to Nvidia.

AMD does have some open source support *BUT* the 7000 series cards (meaning everything released in the last year) are extremely poorly supported with AMD only having released part of the necessary documentation so far (and it took them 10 months to release the part that is out there....).

Not enough information + binary blobs

[storkus]

There are two problems here:

1a. You haven't specified exactly what you'll be doing: if it's just office crap, anything will do; but if you'll be running the GIMP, games, etc, you'll need higher-end hardware (both CPU and GPU).

1b. Do you need x86/x64? If not, a Chromebook or tablet with USB-OTG and hub may be an answer; unfortunately, the below blob problem still applies.

2. For GPUs there are two kinds of drivers: reverse-engineered and proprietary blobs; you almost certainly know this. NVIDIA is the king of the blob department, AMD/ATI is middle of the road, and Intel (along with older stuff like SiS) is mostly completely reverse-engineered or even released open. Bear in mind, the open drivers are messy: based on the state of the art, graphics is by far the most difficult thing to reverse engineer a driver for, and I really feel for the guys working on them! (Edit: AMD/ATI's blobs are well known for being a mess, too!)

Bottom line: if RMS can barely get a machine to his liking, you'll have only a marginally less difficult time. Sorry.

ThinkPenguin's got the best free software support

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike system76, ZaReason, and every other f'ing company there trying to fix the mess. ThinkPenguin's been working with Atheros for instance on getting the complete source for a USB wifi chipset. That'll bring us the first truly Linux friendly USB adapter which is fully supported. There are two other older USB chipsets which are also not dependent on non-free software. The older N chipset has issues with some routers (then again it's really pre-N so that is to be expected) and the G chipset is well supported provided you stick to browsing the web and don't venture off to setup your own access point.

Anyway. Back to ThinkPenguin. The company has a number of laptops at a variety of prices points that anybody can afford. They are starting at $500 and you can throw any distribution on them just about because the company doesn't depend on pieces that are outside the mainline kernel and/or other major projects nor proprietary. And to make you feel better they are HUGE contributors to free software. 25% of there profits go to Trisquel and other projects as well. They are also working on numerous initiatives to better support people around the world. For instance there manufacturing keyboards for a dozen languages/regions and have brought support for lots of other hardware to the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe (as well as elsewhere).

I don't understand the fuss

[smittyoneeach]

I can use emacs at any resolution, irrespective of X11, pointing device, or keyboard.

There's no simple "good" answer.

[wangmaster]

Yes, Linus gave Nvidia the middle finger, and from a certain perspective it was for a good reason, but from another perspective, it's just "ranting".

Nvidia has insisted on closed source proprietary drivers. Does this mean the drivers are crap? Nope, it just makes it very difficult for the open source community to troubleshoot/support them.

ATI/AMD is in the same boat. They have proprietary drivers. Arguably, Nvidia drivers are better. In my experience the ATI/AMD drivers tend to have more bugs. They also have a tendency to release support for a new xorg-server well after the server has been released, thus forcing those of us on the bleeding edge to wait. On the otherhand, they help support the open source drivers, which is great. But, the open source drivers lag behind, so if you're a gamer and dual boot to Windows and have a great ATI/AMD card, it may not work properly under the Linux open source drivers or with a bleeding edge distro with the latest and greatest xorg-server.

Otherwise, if you want "gamer-grade" graphics, you basically have a choice between Nvidia and ATI/AMD. Both have their tradeoffs.

If you don't care about gamer-grade graphics cards, Intel drivers are open source, well maintained, and the new sandy bridge and ivy bridge graphics are more than good enough for almost anything but gaming (they're okay for low to mid-low end gaming but that's about it).

My solution is a thinkpad w520 with optimus graphics. I use optimus graphics under windows when I want to game (quadro 2000m) and use the integrated intel graphics for linux with bbswitch to disable the nvidia gpu so my battery life doesn't suck. But it really does boil down to, do you want to game? If so, you have no choice but a proprietary driver or not-up-to-snuff open source driver. If not, stick with onboard Intel. Decent graphics performance and much better battery life than most discrete solutions.

Wait for Haswell

[Wyzard]

If you can wait awhile longer before buying, Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is reported to have significantly improvied graphics performance, and Intel GPUs are well-supported with free drivers in Linux and Xorg. They're less-powerful than NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but should be fine unless you need to play high-end games on high quality settings.

I have nothing but trouble with Intel graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

My latest experience:

1. I built an Ivy Bridge machine with the latest Intel onboard graphics. I installed Mint 13 KDE, and I got crashes like crazy.

2. I put in an nVidia card, installed the nVidia proprietary driver, and everything has been smooth since.

I've had this exact kind of thing happen on several previous builds. In every case, the solution that worked for me was to ditch the Intel onboard graphics and get nVidia.

I know nVidia's proprietary binary blob sucks, but it's the only thing I've found so far that allows me to stay on Linux.

Maybe other solutions work too, but my recommendation is (1) stay away from Intel graphics, (2) try nVidia first.

Re:something better? what kind of joke is this

[Nutria]

nvidia, ... 80% is in closed, crash-inducing binary lumps.

What universe is this where the nvidia blobs induces crashes on even a semi-regular basis? I can't remember the last time video caused my system to hang/crash and I've been using the nvidia blob for at least 6 years.

Re:Not sad at all

[dmt0]

The "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge" stuff is nice.

I have an Ivy Bridge laptop. What's so nice about it? How much time has passed since the hardware release? I still have tearing artifacts around every title bar on KDE, all because of bugs in drivers - both with Ubuntu's default driver and the one from PPA.

It's all great that their drivers are open and free, but quality-wise they have always been a mess.

At this point, if you want a great out-of-the-box support, all you can do is wait. Either when Intel will improve their quality, or when nvidia fixes their optimus stuff. Don't know much about the AMD side of things.

Re:System76

[ittybad]

I've been developing on a System 76 for about a year and a half now (the then Serval model). I absolutely love it. I've become hooked on the finger print scanner for sudo commands. The only problem that I recall having was trying to upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 for Ubuntu. A bunch-o-things got all fubar. Reinstalling 12.04 worked like a charm and my overall experience got even better than before. I ended up having to put a windows dual boot on it for some windows/mac only video conferencing software for work, and System 76 provided all the drivers to make the windows installation work as expected. The bizarre "windows experience index" gave me a seven point something which is apparently good. I highly recommend System 76, but I have yet to try the other vendors.