On the face of it, my old work laptop should be perfect for Linux. It’s Intel based, drivers are very mature, it has a hefty CPU, 16 GB RAM and a zippy SSD. It was a beast in its day, and it should be able to re-live its glory days as a Fedora box.
My problem is Fedora has moved away from x11 and gone all-in on wayland. But the GeForce 650M GPU this thing shiped with is no longer supported by Nvidia drivers. I need to use the 470 version, which doesn’t seem to work with wayland.
Has anyone gotten akmod-nvidia-470xx/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx working on Fedora 42? Would I have better luck trying a XFCE spin and installing KDE onto that?
UPDATE 24 Hours Later:
I had mostly answered my question with the idea of changing to the XFCE spin. I wiped it and reinstalled that spin which loads LightDM and an x11 environment. I got it working with that starting point. The irony is: I think I may have actually got there on the old spin also - for some reason the 6.16.9-200.fc42.x86_64 kernel won’t display the LUKS prompt with those 470 drivers loaded. I thought it just wasn’t booting. I’ll never know now.
It’s still a bit glitchy, but I think I’ll sort the remaining issues out. Sometimes when something calls OpenGL, the display goes glitchy, but loading nvidia-settings restores things.
When I’m at home, I have a beefy desktop that I can play modern games on. I’m going away for two weeks at Christmas and want to have some simple games to relax with. I’m debating whether to take my MX 3S mouse, or something more portable. I’m not likely going to be able to justify an eGPU.
Besides, the laptop only has Thunderbolt 1 with theoretical max throughput of 10gbps. I doubt I’d get much better than a RX560 going on it - which while supported isn’t really worth the effort. Now that I think about it, I could pick up a second-hand Thinkpad x280 for around the same price and be in a far better spot. That was actually my starting point, I was going to grab one of them before I decided to stretch the life out of this laptop.