Linux Gaming

I'd stick with Windows in your case. No shame in using what works. I had a laptop with hybrid Nvidia graphics and never could get it working satisfactorily with Linux.

There is no shame in defeat so long as the spirit remains unconquered.

I think the issue might be that Nvidia just doesn't support that chipset on the latest drivers. They whacked all the mobile chipsets about a year ago, so all the GeForce mobile stuff doesn't work on latest releases. You'll probably be stuck at a lesser point release for actual desktop-driving stuff, but things like Proton won't be able to work with it anymore as they advance.

This is more about the DirectX interaction with the abstraction layers though.

Off-topic but may I ask what is your disability? I am disabled as well after suffering a stroke that I wasn't supposed to live through, and am passively looking for others like me to game with (I mean anybody is cool but it'd be nice to have others that are in similar situations, for support and stuff). I play racing / shooters / strategy games one-handed, partially blind, with some cognitive struggles.

Hate to say it but I agree with bilb, you might need to stick with windows. I tried Linux on a hybrid graphics laptop a few years ago and it was a disaster. I did get a handful of games to work but nothing that would actually push the graphics card. It was more trouble than it was worth.

I know it doesn't help you, but on desktop with AMD it’s been smooth sailing .

Piper is probably what you want for the mouse (and maybe solaar which handles unifying receiver/bolt connectivity.

As far as Nvidia goes though, that's likely to be the sticking point right now. Maybe at some point they will clean up their act, but I wouldn't hold my breathe so I wouldn't ask you to wait.

Windows 10 may be the better fit right now, and that's ok. Maybe Nvidia will release new drivers in a few weeks or months and you'll have more options, but for now I think Win10 may be the best fit for what you need.

Edit: Maybe see if Mint works out? https://lemmy.world/post/15653242

I had bought a Thinkpad T580 with an nVidia Geforce MX 150. Not a great card by any means. But it should have been enough to run Doom 2016 at about 30 fps.

But the firmware has been super butchered and this fucking thing throttles so aggressively that it even struggles with Quake 3. It's because of some Windows-only thermal configuration that defaults to the most conservative values without OS support. The CPU side of things has since been fixed on Linux (which was throttling too much as well) and ironically that made the GPU side worse because CPU and GPU share a heatpipe.

And fucking nVidia is locked behind tons of proprietary garbage and it's impossible to change anything.

Fortunately I was eventually able to afford a Steam Deck. It's saved my bedridden disabled ass from insanity.

I had pretty good luck with Garuda on an old gaming laptop. In fact I’m pretty sure gaming wise it worked out of the box. Any tweaks I made were for other use cases.

Using NVIDIA Graphics for gaming, I have had the most luck and best performance on Pop!_OS. Thanks to their easy driver-setup and Proton on Steam, I am yet to have a game not run properly.

Yeah, getting the dedicated graphics card and other peripherals on laptop to work is one step more difficult than on desktops.

Keep trying, check protondb for the games you want to play, popos is probably the best, or garuda has support for nvidia out of the box

If nothing else just try back once or twice a year whenever you see a new release from the distro you want to use. The 1660 is a pretty common card so in general it should be well supported.

Check out Windows Xlite, they have 10 and 11. Their install iso's are stripped of all Microsoft's bullshit.