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.

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

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 Because Nvidia refused to implement drivers that followed the Linux semantic (which admittedly was outdated).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.

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.

Performance Is about on par with windows for everything dx9 to dx12. Dx8 and earlier I think are not supported by wine.

In general you will be able to play almost all games, as long as they don’t require kernel level anti cheat, but some online games do block Linux users. In the case of tarkov I can’t help, you should read online.

Older games should be fine, personally I played Max Payne 1 an 2 a couple month ago, and the original Hitman series runs better than on windows.

Expect to do some tinkering on some more advanced games. E.g.: Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Alan Wake 2 require the experimental version of proton, God of War Ragnarok requires to enable SteamDeckMode on a config file to disable PlayStationSDK, usually you will find suggestions on protondb.

Some Nvidia proprietary things will not work in games on wine, e.g.: GPU accelerated physix will not work, also on some games dlss will require editing wine’s registry.