this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm reading again everything to see for something that could help, it's look like optimus could be a solution, thanks

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Optimus gets complex quick. You’ll be reading pci bus ids before you know it. Keep the wiki open, go slowly; you got this :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Why do you think Optimus is what you need? I run Arch with a 1050 and all I did was install the nvidia package and reboot.
Have you already tried that and run into issues?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Because it's a laptop.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have you tried pacman -Syu nvidia?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

this pakage unfortunatley didn´t work

Well, what happened? How didn't it work? Were there error messages?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have a 1050 in my Laptop and it works fine with the nvidia package AS proprietary driver

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Could you please provide me with a guide or tutorial for how to do it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

pacman -Syu nvidia
reboot

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

According to the linked wiki, try to go to https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html.

Check on your laptop with dmesg | grep -i chipset the 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 nvidia with 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

nvidia-dkms has 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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

DKMS would have been my next suggestion too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I've got a bit of experience with NVIDIA Optimus laptops on Linux so here's some questions:

  • What exactly is the problem?

  • 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)

  • Or is the driver not working at all?

  • 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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Btw I use Debian

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

try using nvidia-dkms and linux-headers instead of nvidia