Good night NVIDIA, sweet dreams

Back in the year I bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with Intel and NVIDIA Optimus gpu. It was not great but I am unable to say it was bad, it still runs fine, so it was a good choice. Even though the Linux support for Optimus enabled gpu was kind of bad it was still manageable.

At the time I decided to use Bumblebee + bbswitch (to disable the card), it worked fine. There was a bit of drawback on CPU but it worked kind of nicely, I could run things on NVIDIA with simple command without closing current X.

Years went by on and everything was mostly fine, small things over the time as always. As plus there was support in mainline of NVIDIA drivers. But after a bit more this support was dropped and after an update I was welcomed with not working card, welcome legacy branch (390 for me).

Meanwhile libglvnd landed in Archlinux, what a pain. At first I did not manage to configure Bumblebee properly with it. But after some time I managed and it worked fine, using the card went fine.

There appeared a problem when NVIDIA card just randomly turned on and stayed on. I only heard noise, felt heat or experienced empty battery. This truly turned into HELL, waking up this hungry friend is costly. But I endured for a long time.

After a long time with help of some internet people and entities I managed to resolve one case but it still did not help and other things like Steam, Lutris and even SimpleScreenRecorder still somehow managed to activate the NVIDIA gpu.

It is sad to say but I desire a bit more stable environment. So I had disabled NVIDIA gpu in BIOS.

It was a good ride.

Good night NVIDIA, have a sweet dream.

Articles from blogs I follow:

Why is your open source project still hosted on GitHub?

Perhaps the younger generation don't know anything about the past "evils" of Microsoft and naively believe that Microsoft is now the good friend to open source, but the truth is that all Microsoft acquisitions of open source projects is a busi…

via unixdigest.com May 22, 2025

StarFive VisionFive v2 and FreeBSD

This week I powered up the StarFive VisionFive v2 board that I have. I figured I would give FreeBSD another whirl on it, in the vague hope that RISC-V boards are a more cohesive family than ARM boards were five years ago. tl;dr: I didn’t get it to work as…

via [bobulate] May 20, 2025

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commo…

via danluu.com October 28, 2024

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