Yesterday I bought a new laptop that should be arriving to my home sometime next week. In the mean time, I’ve been digging around and researching some details in order to get Linux running on it as comfortably as possible. My main concern with the laptop is the fact that it has an RTX2050 Mobile on it (I couldn’t find any dedicated AMD laptops within my budget), and my concerns include the fact that I prefer using Wayland on my systems and possible impacts on battery life as I know hybrid graphics in Linux are quite a nightmare.
I’d like to use this system for some casual gaming, however other than that my use cases for the laptop mostly consist of coding and web browsing, so I thought of the following idea: Leaving the dedicated graphics card as a pass-through device for a Windows VM where I could play all my games (though I’m not really sure on how VMs impact anti-cheat for multiplayer games and such), and leaving the Radeon 660M graphics on the Ryzen processor for the Linux system itself, which should be plenty capable of handling any DE and accomplishing my daily tasks, while also preserving battery life as the laptop is not running on the 2050 100% of the time
Does this make sense? Does anyone have a similar setup on their laptop and has it worked for them? Are there any possible consequences I should be wary of when attempting this?
If the laptop model is relevant in any way to answering this question, it’s an HP Victus 15 with a Ryzen 5 7535HS, an RTX2050 Mobile (4GB) and 16GB of RAM.
My gut says you’re probably overestimating the low-intensity power draw of the 2050M. I’d say use it for a while and see if the battery life is actually a problem for you before going this route
I run my 4800hs / 1650 laptop in hybrid mode, it’s ‘OK’ on battery but I bought it used and it’s seen some usage (70% health) in its past life. I’ve been using hyprland for maybe 6 months now and support has only improved with time.
You will run into issues with specific multiplayer titles in a VM, depending on what you plan on playing having a 2nd partition might be the way to go. Some titles won’t care being in a VM, some will flat-out refuse to work or kick you after some time, many are compatible out of the box under Linux / Proton.
Supergfxctl is a handy tool for toggling your dedicated card, my laptop is ASUS so I can’t be certain on the level of compatibility you may see with said tool.
I use an RTX 2060 on Fedora and it work very well. Initial setup is not that hard either, just look for instructions in the Fedora docs. And it works mostly perfect on Wayland, but you need to update through GNOME software so the kernel builds the NVIDIA akmod package. Do note though that updating takes longer this way.