Lets move to me Linux

Hey guys,

I'm tired of baby sitting windows 10. I'm ready to make the real jump to linux. I use openSUSE at home as a proxy server for a subnet but it's a pretty bare machine and I dont' do a ton with it. I use Kali a bit as well, but that's mostly just tools and not really messing with the OS as much.

I have this laptop:

Is there a snowballs chance in hell I"ll actually be able to get it working correctly with that mobile 1070 etc? I'm also planning on putting an NVME SSD in if I can snatch one cheap on black friday, is Linux typically easily bootable from those?

I'm probably going Mint... not really sure on distro yet. I've attempted this one before with openSUSE but it went south pretty quick and I had to move back to Windows because I had work to do.

I'll also need some way to do PCI-E passthrough or something to play games. Mostly I play WoW, battlefield 1, Ttitanfall 2, etc. Stuff that actually needs the graphic oomph.

Thanks guys.

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I'm not sure about the mobile version of the 1070, but I have not had any problems getting my 1080 to work with linux. Really you can look up Nivida drivers for linux in google and it there is a website that has the ppa to install the drivers from, then update drivers using the driver tool in the OS and restart the machine. Now as far as using a NVME. I did have my system running on a Samsung 960 NVME, then I installed it on Raid 0 using two of the 960's NVME's and then installed it on SSD's and noticed no difference in performance. If that saves you some money. However, for a fresh install on Linux I want to warn you that Mint did some crazy.... whatever's, and made two different partitions that made the NVME show up like it was dual booting two different drives. I tried do a manual install by building my own partitions and Mint would not boot unless it had the goofy setup. I don't remember what the system named the partitions, but I want to say it had something to do with a boot partition.

Anyway, do a google search for a PPA for the GPU drivers, and let linux do a auto fresh install on the NVME and you should be ok.

https://johners.tech/2016/07/installing-the-latest-nvidia-graphics-drivers-on-linux-mint-18/

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The mobile GPU drivers are the biggest concern for me really. In Windows the drivers for the mobile devices don't come directly from nVidia. If you try to download them from the geforce experience thing it'll direct you to the manufacturer website of the laptop.

Ask @weskie about dual mobile GPUs

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The 1070 mobiles are really just desktop class GPU's, I'm not aware of mobile driver versions.

I don't think you will have issues with these...

Do you have an SLI config on your Laptop? Also, playing games on linux is eh... Maybe just dual boot is an option for you.

The dual GPU setup for Linux, so Intel + nVidia is pretty easy, you just need to add the correct repos from bumblee.
What you will have to do though is run your games/software using the "optirun" command from the terminal. However, this will be changing rather soon.

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There's only 1 GPU.

The proprietary drivers specify support for the 1070. Does not distinguish variants but I'd guess all inclusive.

Maybe so. I just know in the Geforce Experience panel if you attempt to update the drivers from there it says something along the lines of "for mobile GPU download drivers from manufacturer website."

So I have to download it from MSI then install it.

I had to get my drivers from here seemed to work fine.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

I had issues with LTS distributions with my 970 when new. Maybe try the unstable branches like sid or yakkety on a usb. I had good luck with them.

Yeah even there it recommends that you get it from the oem for whatever reason.

Yeah, I don't get that maybe something to do with custom clock speeds or if the laptop has some auto overclock feature?

I've been running the driver for a few weeks now without any issues but I don't game on my laptop so not sure how it would perform.

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It's an Intel CPU. It's dual GPU.

The iGPU on the Intel chip is actually completely unavailable on these laptops. MSI completely removes them from the equation. I think all of the manufacturers did this on the 10 series laptops actually.

There's no way to turn it back on at all, as far as I can tell. It's completely gone.

Hence why I say it's just one GPU.

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Well that's insane... So much for battery life xD

On the plus side it should be far easier to work with the nvidia drivers. Should be just install the blob and your done.

These rules don't apply on Linux, MSI is not making a Linux driver. Nerd on the street has a Clevo P775DM3-G with a GTX 1070 running on his laptop. So Unconventional methods of installs are out the window...

Have you tried running a LiveDistro on USB yet? They might have done some fiddling for Windows, but that might not translate to Linux... Probably a BIOS option to turn it back on. You have a bunch of digging around to do before you make the jump

Meh. Notebook manufacturers do not rewrite drivers. At best, they test them and decide to skip certain versions. You won't have this kind of support on Linux anyway. Had a previous MSI model (erm, Ghost or something, with 980M) with mint installed. IIRC, by default you will be under nouveau, but you may uninstall it and install nvidia-current instead. To switch between iGPU and dGPU you will need bumblebee. And if you plan to use it for gaming, you may have to dig through game startup scripts and add primusrun here and there.

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System76 has dual GPU laptops that run linux out of the box. Don't waste your time on windows based machines because they don't care about your linux needs. System76 only does linux. They even ship 4k laptops. :P

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the screen is hooked up to the iGPU on the cpu. the dGPU is used to handle heavy workloads while the iGPU does the lighter tasks of drawing the screen, web browsing, etc.

My i7-4710HQ supports both VT-d and VT-x so the i7-6700HQ should as well. the PCI passthrough is going to be left to wether or not the MB of the laptop support IOMMU support. had not had a chance to try passthrough on my laptop yet so i cant say how well it will work.