Most gaming laptops these days don't do GPU switching anyways. They do render offloading, where the laptop display is permanently connected to the integrated GPU only. When you want to use the discrete GPU to play a game, it renders the game frames into a framebuffer on the discrete GPU and then copies the completed frame over PCIe into a framebuffer on the iGPU to then output it to the display. On Linux (Mesa), this feature is known as PRIME. If you have two GPUs and you do DRI_PRIME=1 , it will run the command on the second GPU, at least for OpenGL applications. Vulkan seems to default to the discrete GPU no matter what. My laptop has an AMD iGPU and an NVIDIA dGPU and I've been testing the new NVK Mesa driver. Render offloading seems to work as expected. I would assume the AMD Mesa driver would work just as well for render offloading in a dual AMD situation.
CalcProgrammer1
I'm just using a Dell PC monitor (21" 1080p) from like 2010. It supports HDMI but I don't know about CEC. Either way it could just put the monitor to sleep and that would be fine, doesn't require CEC. I just am not sure of a way to trigger this manually when I'm done using it.
The AMD radv driver is best for gaming at the moment IMO. If you're stuck with NVIDIA hardware then yes, the proprietary driver is the best for gaming as the open source driver is quite slow, but the good news is that this is rapidly changing after being stagnant for 5+ years. NVK is the new open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver in Mesa and it just recently left experimental to be included officially in the next Mesa release. Also, NVIDIA's GSP firmware changes mean that the open source nouveau kernel driver can finally reclock NVIDIA GPUs to high performance clocks/power states thus it could achieve performance parity with the proprietary driver with enough optimization. On my RTX 3070 laptop it is still significantly slower and some games don't work yet, but there is no flickering or tearing that I experience with the proprietary driver. Unfortunately for GTX 10 series users, these cards do not use GSP firmware and have no means of reclocking still so they will be stuck using only proprietary drivers for the forseeable future.
I just set up a bedroom "TV" which is just an old monitor and Raspberry Pi. I installed Kodi and some addons for TV sources. Works OK, just wish there was an easy way to turn the monitor off from the Pi on command so I don't have to walk over to it and shut it off manually.
I mostly use Linux but have a Mac Mini as a TV PC. I use the same browser everywhere - LibreWolf. It's Firefox but with Mozilla's bullshit adware/sponsored garbage removed and some extra privacy-focused features/default settings. Firefox has become adware itself, with its home page having sponsored garbage and suggested stories from partners. I generally love what Mozilla is doing and we need competition in the browser space, but I don't want Mozilla spamming up my homepage with their "suggestions".
Not on my 1080Ti. I have serious flickering on certain apps when using the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers on Arch Linux with GNOME Wayland. Steam flickers and sometimes seems to fail to redraw properly. Had some issues on Discord as well.
I am not in love with the idea of pure hydrogen cars due to the inefficiencies involved, but I can see a hydrogen/BEV plug in hybrid being a good option if hydrogen infrastructure gets built out. As is, I drive a Chevy Volt, and while its battery range is low it is enough for the majority of my daily driving. The biggest downside of pure EVs is charging time when you're driving on long trips, and in my Volt I don't have to worry about that as I can just fill up with gas. Well, do the same thing but with hydrogen rather than gasoline and you have a car that can refill quickly like a gas car but can be powered entirely from renewable energy sources like a pure BEV. You need some lithium but less than you would for a full size battery. You still have the capability to charge at home and assuming the battery can do a reliable 50 miles or so you would only need hydrogen for longer trips. You could leave the hydrogen tank empty to avoid leakage and safety issues when you aren't doing a road trip. Also, hydrogen cars are EVs anyways so the drivetrain doesn't need the extra complexity of a conventional hybrid, just switch power between the battery and hydrogeb fuel cell.
AOSP and even factory kernel source tends to be only mildly useful for proper Linux phone use. Android phones tend to ship with old kernel revisions that the chip maker forked a long time ago and developed their chip drovers on without following accepted kernel conventions or submitting any code to the actual kernel maintainers for proper review and integration into the most up to date "mainline" kernel. Due to this, and the fact that phone makers need to constantly ship new products out the door, the quality of this code added into the old kernel is often garbage, poorly commented and with no documentation. Usually no git history either.
There are other teams of people trying to clean up and/or rewrite these drivers from scratch in a way that is reviewable and acceptable in mainline. Only a small handful of the vast number of phone chips have such support, so proper Linux phone is limited to a small selection of hardware. The designed-for-Linux librem and PinePhone models intentionally chose old chipsets because these chipsets had good mainline support and thus could receive actual kernel updates rather than being stuck forever on an ancient kernel release from the manufacturer that has long since been abandoned.
Lately the Qualcomm Snapdragon SDM845 chip is seeing growing mainline Linux support and quickly becoming one of the most viable chips for mobile Linux that isn't a complete dinosaur in terms of performance and power draw. The OnePlus 6 and 6T, which both use the SDM845 chip, have become quite popular as Linux phones now despite not yet having VoLTE and thus being useless for calls. I carry a OnePlus 6T as a secondary non-phone pocket PC because the Linux experience is very good other than the lack of phone and camera functionality. It's fast and can do all my terminal and coding stuff as well as run full fledged web browsers well.
Nice review. I agree with others here that this phone is borderline scam for the price and with all the delays people had in receiving them. Performance seems on par with the $200 original PinePhone which I had a similar experience with.
The one good thing that came out of Purism/Librem 5 is Phosh. It's a pretty good phone shell/UI for other more capable Linux phones to use. I particularly like Phosh for its on-screen keyboard Squeekboard which allows for custom keymaps.
I've had an A770 Limited Edition since its release in late 2022. Overall, I'm happy with it. The drivers were a mess at launch but now everything works as expected. Performance is decent in the games I play, though I have a 144Hz 4K monitor and it's not really capable of that resolution and refresh rate except on the lightest esports games so I use FSR on most games. My most played game is Overwatch and it hits 144Hz with dynamic resolution scaling on and medium settings. I want to buy a higher end GPU eventually to really push this monitor but waiting to see what happens with the next generation of Intel and AMD cards (NVIDIA is not even in the running unless NVK suddenly gets performance parity with the proprietary drivers).
I think it's the other way around. NVIDIA's marketing name for render offloading (muxless) GPU laptops is NVIDIA Optimus so when the Mesa people were creating the open source version they called it PRIME.