Recommendation for old NVIDIA card that is probably not needed

General
1

A family member is on Windows 10 and I want to show them Linux to check if it might work for them. I want a non-breaking distribution that I will manage. Depending on what they like, I am thinking Aurora for KDE or Bluefin for GNOME.

My only issue is, the Laptop is a „Gaming Laptop“ with a NVIDIA GTX 970M. They don’t game, they mostly do light browsing and internet banking.

I think there are three options I could take, but would like to know which would be the best:

  1. Disable the graphics card and use integrated graphics from CPU (TODO)
  2. Use nouveau
  3. Use proprietary driver and pin it to 580.x

I am not sure if 1 will work, I heard bad things about 2, and not sure how stable 3 would be.

What are your thoughts? I am prepared to fork one of the repos to create my own images with the things required after identifying the best option. Maybe it would also be better to start with ublue but I’d rather not miss out on DE optimizations that Aurora or Bluefin already include.

It would be great to hear some experiences and if you have a reference to a good implementation of it (article or code), I‘ll gladly take that as well :blush:

2

I don’t think the GPU will ever be used since the web browser and everything will run on the iGPU.

You could just use the normal Aurora without the NVIDIA driver. The GPU will not be used so it shouldn’t be an issue but if you really want you can still disable it (Hybrid graphics - ArchWiki). This is what I did on my brother laptop that has a broken GPU to be sure that nothing will run on it and it works great.

If you really want to have the GPU working, Bazzite has an image for legacy nvidia GPUs, which is just Bazzite but with the 580 driver pinned.

3

Sorry for the late response.

I didn’t know this. Thank you! This sounds promising since I can also just select which DE to take. I cannot select Big Picture Mode but Steam will probably go unused anyway.

4

Do you know which Bazzite image it is? I’m trying to move from Aurora-DX-nvidia to Bazzite-DX and have a Quadro M2000 Maxwell GTX 9xx, I tried the bazzite-dx-nvidia image and the resolution is wrong and can’t be changed, then if I try bazzite-dx the resolution is okay on the boot and login screen but after logging in it goes black (I also have a secondary Intel HD Graphics 530).

5

I went to the Bazzite downloads page and clicked through the questions going with “Other Laptop”, “NVIDIA (GTX 9xx-10xx) Series”, and GNOME.

What confuses me a bit is, whythere is two download buttons for bazzite-gnome-nvidia and bazzite-gnome-nvidia Legacy.

Developer stuff is not relevant for me. Not sure if there is an equivalent image.

6

The first (non Legacy marked one) is a LIVE iso and the Legacy ISO uses the old anaconda installer and has no Live desktop capabilities.

7

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