Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.
Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.
I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.
And then I couldn’t get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.
The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it’s doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!
No you don’t, they’re mutually exclusive, there are a couple of ways to check which one you’re running, from
lsmod
to check which module is loaded on the kernel to my favorite:glxinfo | grep -i vendor
First of all don’t run random commands from the internet without understanding them. Now to what that command does,
glxinfo
prints a lot of output about what’s being used to render OpenGL, you might need to install mesa-demos, mesa-tools or something else if glxinfo is not installed by default. Then the pipe, i.e. the vertical bar|
says to grab the output from the left command and feed it to the right command.grep
is used to filter an input, and the-i
flag tells it to do it without being case sensitive, i.e. Insensitive. Thenvendor
is the text you’re using as a filter. Long story short that command shows information about the vendor used to render OpenGL.If it says Nvidia you’re using the proprietary driver (which you should use from your other comment). If it says Mesa you’re using the open source drivers (which should be “fine” but will have very bad gaming performance)
sam@sam-ROG-Strix-G531GT-GL531GT:~$ glxinfo | grep -i vendor server glx vendor string: SGI client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI Vendor: Intel (0x8086) OpenGL vendor string: Intel
so this means im using my proccesor and not gpu to render shite?
From our other reply you should be fine, this is a prime laptop so it will use the CPU for everything unless you specify different z that’s by intent to preserve power since Nvidia cards consume lots of it and otherwise your battery would last an hour or so, windows does the same, the difference is that Windows tries to guess which apps need it and on Linux you have to be specific about it.
Ty!
Quick test you can run to confirm this is
lspci | grep nvidia
andlspci | grep nouveau
one of them will display something and the other nothing (hopefully),nvidia
is the name of the properietary driver,nouveau
is the open source one.this seems to imply it ll switch the gpu on or off depending on load
Ok, prime laptop, run the following then:
prime-run glxinfo | grep -i vendor
if prime-run doesn’t work there are others like optimun, I’ll check which one is the correct for mint and reply back.sam@sam-ROG-Strix-G531GT-GL531GT:~$ prime-run glxinfo | grep i vendor grep: vendor: No such file or directory
prime-run: command not found
Yeah, there might be an nvidia-prime package or something, either that or the command in mint must be different. Quick Google didn’t helped me and it’s after 1AM for me so my brain is not helping either, hopefully someone else can help you, if not tomorrow I’ll be back.
But everything looks correct, Nvidia settings only works if the Nvidia driver is installed, now all you need is to figure out how to tell Mint to run things with the Nvidia GPU and you should be good to go.