On the other hand, Linux (or more accurately, the Linux desktop ecosystem) doesn't support a lot of high-end PC gaming features well: HDR, Nvidia GPUs, VR, etc.
> HDR
Already supported
> Nvidia GPUs
You have it the wrong way around. NVIDIA had issues supporting Linux, not Linux supporting NVIDIA. AMD drivers work fine, so its not a linux specific issue.
> VR
SteamVR works though?
Is it though? I confess I haven’t tried in a few weeks but until last time I did, to get HDR in games you had to start a session with `gamescope` rather than a DE, and still had to set a bunch of flags - and in some ways have a very subpar experience with problems with mouse movements and other issues I can’t recall.
I exclusively game on Linux and I find the experience far superior than doing anything on the other OS, but last I checked HDR was not actually supported.
If you want a laptop with good battery life Intel is generally the way to go.
A lot of this is due to the enormous amount of effort Valve put into improving the open source AMD drivers, which is what is used on their Steam platform.
Of course if you want CUDA you need Nvidia, but if you use Nvidia to drive your Linux desktop expect some suffering to go along with it.
Running NixOS with a pretty vanilla configuration and it has been hassle free.
I did have to disable power management at the system level because framerate suffers severely if the system sleeps and wakes back up, but I shut the system down when I’m not using it, so this was a non factor for me.
Not at a level where the experience is more fun than frustation.
I think Windows isn’t that different, just that there's more motivation for NVIDIA or Microsoft to fix those things. I recall not that long ago a combination of Windows 11, my NVIDIA RTX 40xx, my previous Dell Alienware monitor also had some issues with switching between SDR and HDR (and later Dolby Vision brought even more of a mess).
Meanwhile Android and iOS phones have been able to do it flawlessly for a while now…
All the ML people are using NVIDIA GPU's on Linux.
i3 should be pretty easy switch from sway if you haven't tried.
