Not sure if this is a good place to ask for help, but I have scoured the internet and no one has a solution, so hopefully this question helps me as well as others.
I’m trying to get my computer to run at its best when on Hyprland. I have an MSI Raider GE76 which has an Nvidia GTX 3080 Mobile and an Intel Tiger Lake CPU with integrated graphics.
I typically have an external display over display port, an Ultrawide 3440x1440@60Hz, and the internal laptop display is on eDP at 1920x1080@360Hz. Note tho that while I often have the dual screen setup, I do need to be able to go to just the Intel display. The Nvidia GPU drives all outputs (DP, HDMI, Thunderbolt) EXCEPT for the eDP which is connected to the Intel card.
On X11, I could use reverse prime sync to use the Nvidia card for everything and just have the Intel card draw whatever the Nvidia card renders. This worked well. Unfortunately there isn’t anything like that for Wayland, and I don’t have a hardware switch to put the eDP on the nvidia side of things.
This means that I have to use the default prime modes to run stuff on the nvidia card which makes the second screen incredibly laggy. Now, I can disable the i915 module and the external display becomes buttery smooth, but I can’t use my built-in display (which means I also can’t use the display when I’m not connected to the external monitor).
How can I get both to work well on Wayland?
Can I run the external display exclusively on Nvidia and the internal on Intel with Prime? That could work, but idk if that’s possible.
What’s the optimal way to set up an external display on Wayland with and Nvidia hybrid-graphics laptop? Bc right now I’m thinking of just going back to X11 and praying it gets enough support to live until I can get a decent Wayland config.
I don’t have such a laptop, so I can’t really speak for experience, but I can tell you what I know.
You definitely can use prime to render a program on the dgpu and display it on the igpu, this requires basically no configuration at all on wayland, I even did it on my desktop computer when Wayland didn’t run on Nvidia. But I don’t know if you can or why you would use the dgpu for everything instead of only selected programs (games).
What you really need is a compositor that properly uses both GPUs and can use the ports of both at the same time, hyperlaneld might just be bad at that. Gnome should be in a better position so you can start from here and see if gnome behaves better.
Also, are you sure you want to use a tiling compositor on a gaming laptop? Wouldn’t it be a better experiment to just go with gnome? It’s visually polished and goes well with trackpads.
Also, are you sure you want to use a tiling compositor on a gaming laptop
I can’t go back to moving windows around by hand. It’s so tedious. I can’t stand it anymore. Even on Windows which I use for work I always install FancyWM to achieve some sense of tiling. It’s just imo a superior way to use a computer.
That said, GNOME has the fantastic Pop Shell 2 which functions similar to Hyprland or i3, so that’s fine on GNOME. Honestly, I’m hopeful for COSMIC and plan to try it out once it gets out of Alpha.
The problem I have with GNOME is I always end up breaking it in a way that I can’t restore it. Some extension or GTK theme tweak or something, even when uninstalled, always seems to get it stuck in a bad state. It doesn’t like customization. KDE does, but it doesn’t have as good tiling support (there’s Polonium, which is… okay).
Perhaps I’ll try it again tho. I’ve used GNOME for several months at a time before, but I had problems when switching to Wayland a couple years ago initially (which I’m sure are fixed now).
A couple years ago it could never have worked properly, Nvidia drivers didn’t support Wayland. Because Nvidia refused to implement drivers that followed the Linux semantic (which admittedly was outdated). About a year ago, after many years of work, they published a new semantic that Nvidia was willing to implement. Alongside that, a new Wayland protocol was added so that compositors could opt-in the new semantic when the driver supports it. So, to use Wayland with Nvidia you need both a recent enough Nvidia driver (I think anything after last July) and a compositor that implement the linux_drm_syncobj_v1 protocol. I’m not even sure hyperland supports it, so you should also look into that before continuing.
P.s.: gnome’s mutter, and kde’s kwin (which are the name of their compositors) both supported that protocol since the very day after it was released, so those are guaranteed to work if they are recent enough, unless if you are on Ubuntu lts which stripped it out for a pet peeve about adding features to lts releases.
Yeah, I may just go back to Gnome/KDE.
I recently switched OS from NixOS to Arch which is why I wanted to give Hyprland a second try while I was messing with stuff.
I was on KDE before with not a ton of issue, but well, the tiling options on KDE are few and limited, so I wanted to go back and retry a dedicated tiler. I was on i3 and happy for a long time before switching to Wayland (which happened once I could get decent game performance), then I was on Hyprland for a while, then switched around a bit, and then settled on KDE once I discovered Polonium which I could live with.
I’m gonna give GNOME a shot for now, and just try not to tweak it too much (other than Pop Shell)
Yes most tiling solutions on KDE are half-baked even the new built-in (at least the last time I tried) but Krohnkite is really solid. It was forked to Bismuth, then that one got defunct after a major kwin update. But it’s back again as Krohnkite (infinite thanks to the maintainers). It’s rock solid and even has a B-Tree Layout now. I’m on X11 but the last time I tried it also worked nice with Wayland.
Splitting the thread here. I personally used i3wm for more than a year and became white fast with it, then I had to use windows for a month and when I went back to i3 it was a pain, I couldn’t do shit. It was at that moment I decided “why can’t I just stop forcing myself to this PITA and just use the mouse faster?” And I never used a tiling VM again, personally I use kde on desktop and gnome on laptop.
But, I can see the appeal of automatic tiling, so I raise you this: scrollable compositors. You get both the benefits of automatic positioning and oc moving things in and out of the way, without keeping track and managing 10 virtual desktops
why can’t I just stop forcing myself to this PITA and just use the mouse faster?
You know that i3 has support for mouse, right? Really good support in fact.
I use the mouse all the time in tiling window managers, not exclusively keyboard shortcuts, especially for well, window management. Win + Right Click and drag to resize and Win + Left Click to move a window into place. However, unlike traditional desktops, when I move the window, it snaps to a reasonable and consistent tiling location instead of just left/right snapping, a random place it can get covered up, or tiled using some awful extraneous system like KDE’s tiling system or some of the Windows little GUI popups. I also sometimes use floating windows.
The nice thing about tilers is they can do traditional usage well whereas traditional desktops cannot do tiling well. Heck, dynamic tilers can’t even do tiling well.
I often make use of very complex layouts like this:
-------------------------------------- | Win A | Win B | | | | | |---------------| |--------------------| Win C | Win D | | Win E |---------------| | | Win F | --------------------------------------That many windows with different priorities and visible at once is just not possible to do in traditional desktops or even in dynamic tilers like DWM or KDE’s Bismuth plugin.
I need something that makes window organization EASY, and that is manual tilers.
I’ll have to look into the scrolling compositor. That does sound interesting.
without keeping track and managing 10 virtual desktops
Also, I don’t understand what you mean here. I’m very curious to what troubles you had with workspaces.
What is there to manage? Do you not use virtual desktops at all anymore? I use them even in traditional desktops (including Windows).
It’s just a place to put more windows when you run out of room on a screen or when doing a different task, what’s the difficulty there?
Did you always use all 10? I don’t usually need more than 2, and if I do, then I don’t usually need more than 4
I still use virtual desktops, just a lot less because I can just minimize windows instead of banishing them to a different desktop, and that’s how you quickly end up using too many desktops, the problem is that then you need to remember where every window is when you need it back. With regular wm you can just press the icon to go back to the window regardless of where it is.
Scrollables are neat. I think Niri or KDE + Karousel might be useful to me. Thanks for the tip
Graphics switching in Linux is still not really great due to a number of reasons, but it’s certainly more tricky with Nvidia. You can still use render offloading with your two GPUs, but it depends on how your device has its outputs mapped, and it sounds like your laptop is hardwired to the Nvidia side of things except the one port.
Have a look at this thread as an example to see how you can set certain things to launch and use offloading, maybe it will set you on the right path.
Bullshit, it works flawlessly if you read the manual and set it up correctly.
