I can't answer the laptop issue specifically. I have two desktops with Nvidia in it. And it runs fine apart from one of them being out of date of the official drivers. It's not nearly the hassle it was a decade ago. AMD is always easier generally. But these days Nvidia is pretty stable as well. Especially if you have a modern 20+ series card supported by their current drivers

Lol, I don't know. I purposely bought AMD / Radeon because I heard I didn't have to load no dumb proprietary binary blob. It's been good. Just works.

I have an Intel CPU and an Nvidia 2070m running in a laptop. CachyOS installed flawlessly. All I've ever had to do is sometimes select a different proton compatibility layer from the steam drop-down.

I cannot properly express to you how easy and smooth this has been. Smother and easier than any OS I've ever used, and I'm from the pre-HDD era.

I was even able to run two screens at different resolutions without much hassle. Though sometimes if a game was trying to run on the lower resolution monitor in windowed fullscreen, it will run at the higher resolution and get downsampled. The fact that two different resolution screens on an Intel/nvidia laptop works AT ALL though, is unheard of.

I have the most notoriously bad Linux gaming setup, and Cachy got me into new games in under a dozen clicks from a fresh format. Install OS>install steam>install game>play.

This laptop was a gift though. If I were buying, I'd go with a more traditionally Linux supported setup. The compatibility and distro options are way bigger with AMD, and you'll be supporting a company that supports the community.

The only issue of note is the binary blob, and NVIDIA’s refusal to digitally sign the driver. Thus if you have Secure Boot enabled, you need to take the added steps to resign your drivers every system update, which is a pain, or disable secure boot, which may lock you out of some future stream games.

I'm running a 13th gen core i9 and an rtx 4070 on my rog zephyrus. It runs CachyOS beautifully.

No complaints for the two-ish years I've had it.

It's not a nightmare, but I'll still go with AMD next time. I think NVIDIA does a really poor job with drivers still. I keep having sleep issues.

No.

I have hardware is the generation you're thinking of. A T480 with intel and an Nvidia mx150. There's been a few options, but at the end of the day those Nvidia drivers are the weak spot.

I've been running the intel chip exclusively for at least a couple of years. I don't do gaming and that mx150 is lacking by modern standards. I use primecontrol to toggle between the integrated/dedicated/Optimus modes.

It was doomed from the start. The intel chip is the one driving the screen, so whatever the mx150 does need to be copied over to that framebuffer on an already saturated bus.

I’ve been maining Linux for a couple years now on Nvidia and it’s.. awesome. It is not the nightmare it used to be, assuming you use the Nvidia drivers. I’ve not found anything in my Steam library I can’t run. Same with Heroic.

I prefer CachyOS but Bazzite I’ve heard good things about as well. I’ve successfully used Fedora and a handful of others also (but I refuse to try Ubuntu - not a fan), so, pick your flavor and try it out.

Now it’s to the point where I rarely have to visit protonDB.. most games just work (I use cachyos’ proton build as my default).

Give it a shot. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Generally it's fine, but right now, with my laptop, I'm having to use run an older kernel version because the Nvidia drivers haven't been updated in the Ubuntu repositories. Installing drivers for Nvidia isn't hard, but it is something you have to elect to do, and it is something that can break. Meanwhile, with AMD GPUs, it generally 'just works'.

IMO, given two laptops of equal value, I would pick the AMD, but I wouldn't pick a worse laptop in order to have an AMD card.

Laptops are still a bit fucky. Manufacturers often put proprietary power savings and performance optimisation functionality that expects Windows install, and Linux can't emulate properly.

I spent 3 hours getting a laptop to "work"; the quotes meaning it's very "quirky". Stuff like, don't ever close the lid or you'll have to suffocate restart it, had to turn off all power savings settings, a few things required deep research and sudo nano config files, etc.

It's ok now and mostly works while plugged in, but be prepared.

Have been maining an Intel +nvidia laptop a couple years now with a few distros and the only issue I have ever had is wake on sleep gremlins. Those are present in all the distros I have tried but it is pretty minor and doesn’t bother me much.

I have an Intel + Nvidia laptop, it works as it should. Is it a recent laptop?

Nah, it is all transparent for me. I don't decide to run something with the dedicated graphics, it just runs as needed it seems. Maybe I have it misconfigured and it is using the dedicated graphics all the time, I'm not sure, but it works fairly well given the hardware it has.

I have a laptop with i7-8th generation and Nvidia 1050ti with Linux Mint. It works flawlessly out of the box

My gaming laptop is running fine with Bazzite though I forget what the cpu is.

Jank old laptop with an mx150 discrete and Intel cpu/GPU running fine on Kubuntu but haven't tried to game or do anything demanding with it. Running better than win11 tho.

It still has its problems but is loads better than what it used to be, less issues with swapping the GPU for intensive applications

Have an i7+4060 laptop, main issue I faced was the thermal throttling because these components get hot fast. NVIDIAs poor drivers really limit your ability to underclock and Intels load line calibration was all over the place for the cpu series.

Make sure you can get the fan controllers working properly, I had to implement the EC firmware for my laptop to get it running properly - something worth checking before buying

I've been running Mint on a system with an nvidia GPU for almost two years. The only problem I have really had is one particular silly game (Cosmoteer) that takes a bit of massaging to run, every other game works either as well or better than windows. It keeps a gaming computer from 2020 working and playing games in 2026.

I set up my old ASUS dinosaur with NixOS a couple years back. It has an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU (it's a 2012-2013 model ROG laptop that my ex abandoned). I don't know how other Linux distros would play, just due to the stuff I hear about the battles between dedicated and internal graphics, but NixOS let's me just declare the GPU I want running 100% of the time, so that was an easy fix for me.

It's so old it has to use Nouveau drivers. It doesn't game all that well (at least not with Steam), even though it was a monster laptop back in it's day. I tried to play Moonring through Steam, which is just an indie, pixel-graphic roguelike and it was choppy af. Tales of Maj'eyal wouldn't run at all. However, the Nix packages for Pixel Dungeon and it's derivatives ran fine. I haven't taken the time to troubleshoot Steam yet, though.

You could backup your stuff, throw a few distro ISOs you're interested in alongside a Windows ISO on Ventoy, and just give it a whirl. Worse comes to worse it just doesn't work and you already have Windows ready to reinstall. Alternatively, it could work with some issues you'd have to troubleshoot, or best case it could just work.

I installed CacyOS on my MSI laptop with Nvidia m2060 + igpu and Intel CPU a couple of months ago. I can play genres through Steam just fine. It performs better than it did on Windows 11.

I'll be honest, I was amazed I had no issues getting it running. CachyOS has sone great tools to set things up and their wiki is excellent. I just followed the steps in there to set up GPU switching. I disabled secure boot, since that can get in the way of drivers loading, but they have instructions for that as well.

Wi-Fi worked out of the box. I even have a luks encrypted root.

The main issue I had was MSI specific hardware, like battery charging control, normally managed by the Dragon Center. I found an open source replacement for that.

I can't speak to the battery performance since I always use it plugged in. It's a few years old so it's probably not great anyway.

Your mileage may vary. It's probably going to be more off a struggle with hardware specific to the model of laptop rather than Nvidia.

I am running a System76 Oryx Pro with a Nvidia Optimus(hybrid GPU) chip set and an Intel CPU. I would be lying if I said there were no problems but things have been incredibly stable on the latest drivers. I am not on an Arch based Distro so I can't speak to that, but most issues I have had have been solved with a bit of tinkering.

i got a used thinkpad with nvidia t1000 about a year ago. i installed kubuntu on it, chose the proprietary driver from the driver manager thingy and rebooted.
i forget the driver is even a thing. it switches to it automatically when i start a game, and it uses intel igpu when on battery. not a single issue yet and I've used it almost daily.

Use Mint and you'll be fine.

I am running an i5 and a GTX 3050 with 32GB of ram on CachyOS on an HP Victus laptop.

I am quite content with how well everything functions. I have found very few issues that don't have a workaround of some kind, and even those kinds of issues are fewer and further between in the past few months.

I have been using NVIDIA under Linux since 2005, then in 2025 I switched to AMD. I have lots more problems with the Radeon, like the driver just crashing, taking the whole X server and all applications with it. That never happened with NVIDIA.

Gaming on a laptop is a path that will lead to failure eventually; get a desktop computer.

Haven't tried it since the move to COSMIC, but Pop!OS used to GPU switching in its settings GUI. It worked really well for my nontechnical family member's laptop that had Intel and Nvidia. Was in the power management controls, IIRC.

I have a desktop and laptop that are both Intel and nvidia running bazzite and they've been fine.

I have an AMD laptop from 2015 with an Nvidia 960M; running Bazzite, playing Steam games, and hosting a local Jellyfin server. Works great!

That all said, I picked Bazzite specifically for the rollback. In the event that an update has bad compatibility with something (happened with a Bluetooth driver a few years ago), I can just rollback until it gets fixed.

I had to install nbfc for proper fan control, other than that everything is smooth

Good question. I'm afraid I don't have an answer to it. I got laptops without Nvidia stuff after that. But I still remember not upgrading to the latest kernel because of the proprietary drivers. The free ones used a lot of battery and it took years to get acceptable performance out of them... I had to read about optimus, bumblebee, screen tearing... Also got the laptop to just come up with a black screen once or twice after a bigger update... I heard it got better after that. But no clue if that's really the case.

Asus advantage edition laptop has all AMD

It's not a nightmare unless you want to use steams gaming mode for a HTPC

Been using for some 2~3 years now a Nitro 5 laptop almost always set to the Nvidia GPU. Issues are very rare, and some times compatibility is actually better than with the other GPU, the Intel one. Also worth noting I use Linux Mint though, and been some years since I last tested systems based Arch (btw).

It's fine. Asus laptop with Intel/Nvidia (2023ish), all-AMD desktop (2026ish), both fine with CachyOS. No issues to note really

I have an almost 20 year old laptop with an i5 and a 1050ti, installed CachyOS and it just works. Afaik it uses igpu by default, havent tried much yet but i can see that the laptop is pretty silent normally and gamee run well with a command that makes them use dgpu.

It was a right pain in the ass to make Arch work with my setup (GTX 1650 ti as dGPU) as only the dGPU has HDMI for an external monitor connected to it. I vaguely remember fiddling with reverse PRIME and then generating xorg conf file using nvidia's tools. (Yeah, still using X11)

been running bazzite and its been great. this is what the info center shows:

Processors: 16 × Intel® Core™ i7-10875H CPU @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.1 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Design
Graphics Processor 2: Intel® UHD Graphics

I don't know in general, but in my particular case it's been smoothly sailing. Lenovo Legion (2024 edition), Intel CPU, and nvidia 4060. Linux Mint.