We have Thinkpad Linux laptops running with NVidia at work. The proprietary driver has quality issues, the biggest of which for us is power management and poor battery life. Nouveau performs much better in this regard, even though they had to reverse engineer the hardware (!) I will be advising my IT department not to continue to buy NVidia.
Not sure if this is relevant to you, but I thought I'd share an experience with my T440p that uses a quad-core Kaby Lake CPU and optimus graphics. I run Fedora on it. I am using the HD 4600 gpu which is wired to the LCD, and I occasionally use the nvidia gpu w/ proprietary drivers via optirun.
I'd always seen terrible power efficiency on battery with Fedora. It was much worse than any previous Thinkpad. I mostly treat it like a luggable, always plugged into the wall. I wasn't sure if it was the CPU or chipset, but it never got into deeper package-level idle states like other machines.
However, I recently discovered that if I suspend and resume the laptop right after I switch from AC to battery power, the laptop runs in a much more efficient mode. It gets into those deeper idle states and can get almost 6 hours of life out of its aging batteries for basic office/communication tasks with wifi. If I don't suspend it once, it will only get close to 2.5 hours even if almost completely idle the whole time.
I have a Dell XPS with an Nvidia 1050, running Fedora 29.
The Nouveau driver was so bad here that I blacklisted all the drivers and just use the Intel GPU. It's the difference between 3 hours or 6 hours of battery.
It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.
>It apparently ran the Nvidia power on even when no program wanted to use it.
Are you sure you didn't install nvidia drivers? That is a common symptom with nvidia binary drivers. Nouveau on the other hand is fine with powering the device off when not used. For nvidia drivers, the bbswitch method is more reliable, but is apparently deprecated by distros these days.
On all my laptops, nouveau never outperformed the proprietary driver in battery life. It didn't even support power management on most GPUs - when did that change?
That is extremely difficult. Lenovo doesn't make any high end laptops without nvidia. You'll be restricted to the X series and the T series. Dell is also quite similar, although at one point they had intel only options for their precision lineup. Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end (i.e., real i7 with 4-6 cores, xeon etc.).
> Basically, all vendors tack on the nvidia card once you get into high end
Yup. By adding a Nvidia card (or, far less commonly, an ATI/AMD one) they can sell that laptop as a specialty "Gaming" machine - and with margins on commodity hardware being so razor-thin these days, that's exactly what shrewd marketers need!
