Not entirely sure if this is the right place to post this, but it’s the best I could figure out. I just got a new laptop (an optimus laptop) and went through the usual wringer of installing bumblebee, which has become increasingly unusable. On my old laptop, for instance, bumblebeed would simply stop working any time the laptop would go to sleep, making it unusable.
Here, it continues to work after going to sleep but primusrun no longer works with most software (games). Optirun works more broadly (and performs better), but requires several per-application hacks and still doesn’t work 100% of the time. Optirun and primusrun still don’t play nice with WINE.
I appreciate the work the bumblebee maintainers put in, but it was always a hack and relied on fancy footwork and an unholy combination of dkms, acpi and Xorg to simulate what windows users were getting on the driver level. It was necessary because NVIDIA wasn’t providing support for linux on the same driver level that windows enjoyed. However, that is no longer the case. NVIDIA now provides tumbleweed drivers in addition to the leap drivers they have previously been providing. Those drivers support, natively, prime synchronization, so long as other software requirements, all of which are exceeded by the current leap and tumbleweed, are met. We no longer need the hack.
Of course there are issues. The environment needs to be set up a particular way for it to work. Other distros have packages that automate this process, but SuSE does not. We used to have a user-maintained package, before prime was really viable, but that has atrophied and no longer works on the current leap or tumbleweed or with current drivers. The instructions from NVIDIA don’t seem that complicated but, like many users, I am an idiot when it comes to the graphical system.
All that is to say, there doesn’t seem much reason to not provide an easy way for users to use prime, considering how overwhelmingly popular optimus laptops are and now that both versions of the distribution are fully supported by NVIDIA. Referring users to bumblebee, with all its problems and given the fact that it has always been a workaround in place of a native solution, no longer makes sense. This is a huge hole in the distribution and it would be really nice for a lot of users like myself if it would be closed. If only so I don’t have to go through a few dozen steam entries to see which ones require a nonsensical flag just to get optimus to work properly.
Thanks.