So i’m helping my best friend to try instaling nvidia gtx 1050 mobile drivers on his laptop, we genualy don’t know what to do and i can figure out how to make it work, so it would be very helpfull if someone could explain me what to do or provive me with a guide to make it work
I’m reading again everything to see for something that could help, it’s look like optimus could be a solution, thanks
Optimus gets complex quick. You’ll be reading pci bus ids before you know it. Keep the wiki open, go slowly; you got this :)
Indeed, since it’s a laptop. It uses the iGPU for battery saving graphics and the Nvidia dGPU for performance. That’s hybrid graphics / optimus.
That said, Nvidia is a pain. I always recommend distrohopping until you land on a distro that mostly works for your use case and go from there.
The best thing about arch is the wiki.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
That said, on a laptop, you will likely need prime, optimus, or bumblebee depending on your CPU/GPU.
I’m looking right now on optimus, and it’s seems like it’s what we need, we’ll be testing it as soon as possible, thank you very much!
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Because it’s a laptop.
Have you tried
pacman -Syu nvidia?Yes, he is been using arch for almost year and a half but he has never managed to make the drivers work, this pakage unfortunatley didn´t work neither when he tried himself or now while I’m trying to help him, thanks btw
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I have a 1050 in my Laptop and it works fine with the
nvidiapackage AS proprietary driverCould you please provide me with a guide or tutorial for how to do it?
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According to the linked wiki, try to go to https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html.
Check on your laptop with
dmesg | grep -i chipsetthe codename of your graphic card. With this you can check which driver is the best on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA. There is a paragraph, explaining which driver is the best.If I understand it right, the nvidia package is the correct one for 1050. So you can use
pacman -S nvidiawith root privileges. All dependencies should be resolved automatically.I would recommend to reboot, in case there are changed kernel modules.
2 things i have to note: Using Wayland is a total mess with nvidia. Specially on Arch Linux. I have screen flickering in GUI and games, the performance is so lala and tools like KeePass which needs access to the text in window titles did not work complete. On Manjaro, the flickering doesn’t exist, but the other symptoms do. Maybe im missing some packages on Arch.
Second with Vulkan i have some tearing in games. I have not looked further in to that.
On the other hand, games like Satisfactory or Elder Scrolls Online, have more FPS with the same settings as on Windows.
Currently i test Arch and Manjaro in parallel on the same Laptop. But I tend to keep Manjaro and remove Arch. There are light pro’s and con’s, but overall, I’m more happy with Manjaro. But this has nothing to do with you’re issue.
nvidia-dkmshas never not worked for me. Arch wiki has more info in the nvidia page.If this laptop is your friend’s main laptop, I’d recommend going for something other than arch or at the very least preparing before going into it
DKMS would have been my next suggestion too.
We’re thinking in the possibility of using debian only for games, because he’s been using arch for almost a year and a half and he likes it very much, but we could prefer having the drivers working on arch directly for convenience
I’ve got a bit of experience with NVIDIA Optimus laptops on Linux so here’s some questions:
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What exactly is the problem?
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Are games not running on NVIDIA?
In this case you need to add an environment variable to the launch options in steam, the name of which has escaped me (should be on OPTIMUS page of Arch wiki)
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Or is the driver not working at all?
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What desktop environment/wm are they using?
For example if you’re using GNOME in the settings program in the about the system section (the last one) and in the System information dialog check to make sure it says something like “NVIDIA GTX 1050 Mobile”. Also make sure the NVIDIA driver program shows up with the other apps
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If it ends up being Optimus, I’ve found optimus-manager-qt from the aur to be great. You don’t have to mess around with configs and you can make switching or setting to Nvidia permanently really easy with it
Lts Kernel
try using nvidia-dkms and linux-headers instead of nvidia
Btw I use Debian
Nuke it and install Pop for Nvidia. No sense in using Arch.
He likes arch and the whole point of the existence of distros is that you could take one and adjust it to your needs
Correct, but when you don’t know how to install the drivers for your GPU you might hit be ready for Arch.
Agreed. Spend the the time learning something meaningful like programming not how to configure certain bits of software to save a couple of MB.
What does that have to do with anything?
While off-topic, I’m of the opinion that Arch only exists to support elitists which relates to the comment.
- Arch isn’t always the most up to date
- It isn’t very reliable
- It doesn’t try to be any easier to use (won’t even work with GNOME software)
- It’s not as straight forward to contribute to like, say, Void Linux which causes issues with burnt-out and busy maintainers
- It installs the the bare minimum so stuff won’t always work
- The only real benefit is you get a smaller install size (x86 only) and maybe some more customisablility.
But for some reason it gets treated like an ideal for every Linux user to reach. It’s supposedly like to going to the Olympics as an elite athlete. An Arch system needs more work to maintain, but there isn’t really much to gain
Every point you made is either patently false (isn’t up to date, won’t even work with gnome) or doesn’t make any sense (installs the bare minimum, so stuff won’t always work).
The only part we agree on is that arch isn’t for everyone.
I think he meant the application GNOME Software. Only valid point, I would like to be able to install or at least update my arch packages through GNOME Software like I do with flatpaks. Doesn’t have anything to do with the way Arch works tho, it’s just that no one has made a plugin yet that allows this.
Ah, I didn’t realize there was actually a piece of gnome software literally called “gnome software” lol. Not confusing at all.
