Hey, beautiful people of Linux, I need some advice. I’ve been tinkering for the past several weeks on flavours of Plasma DE on Arch and Tumbleweed on my Nvidia/Alder Lake setup. Suffice to say the experience was nothing short of getting waterboarded in Guantanamo by Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity high-fiving each other while Laura Ingraham supervises.

While X11 is mostly working, I’ve basically given up on getting VA-API and Wayland to work. I’m considering getting a Beelink Mini PC with 7940HS and 780M to finally be able to daily drive a setup without compromises. Bonus points if Hyprland actually works without sketchy black market patches that you buy off a guy in the back alley behind Wendy’s.

Looking for any advice or experience anyone might have.

  1. Does VA-API and AV1/VP9/HEVC HW decoding in browser actually work? Any browser at all.
  2. Does Wayland actually work without glitches on the 780M?
  3. Does Hyprland work out-of-the-box, if ever?
  •  Sentau   ( @Sentau@lemmy.one ) 
    3•9 months ago

    I can confirm that VP9, HEVC and H.264 encoding/decoding work when using the VA-API. Can’t comment on AV1 hardware acceleration as my RDNA1 card does not support it but no reason why it should not work. Also keep in mind that in both fedora and opensuse, the official Mesa package does not contain the code needed for HEVC and H.264 encoding as these are not royalty free and hence have been removed in fear of a lawsuit. You can replace these Mesa installs with community packaged versions which have support for all codecs.

    Arch, debian and other distros don’t have this problem.

    Edit : Regarding the browser support for video acceleration, Firefox and its derivatives, support can be enabled easily(but it’s not enabled out of the box). Chromium supports it as well but I have not tried it as I use Firefox and have only dabbled with chromium

    •  milkjug   ( @milkjug@beehaw.org ) OPEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      You sir are a scholar and a gentleman. Thank you for the inputs! Just to confirm if you don’t mind a stupid question, I understand VAAPI works for you, does it also work for browsers with YouTube? I’m asking this specifically because I could get hwdec working with MPV with Nvidia but YouTube refuses to use hwdec regardless of browser for me. How about yours in Firefox at least with YouTube specifically?

  •  inspector   ( @inspector@gadgetro.id ) English
    1•9 months ago

    I actually have an old laptop with a GTX 780M and a Core i3 3rd Gen running Arch.

    When I tried GNOME on it with Fedora, it defaulted to X11 on login when it detected the Nvidia card. However, mine was also an Optimus laptop, and I could mostly always get Wayland working with the iGPU on the Intel. This is how I mostly ran for a year or two without ever using the dGPU.

    I need to chuck in a new SSD on that, but I could check it out let you know if anything’s changed in recent years. I don’t think wayland support for older nvidia cards have even been worked on in the last couple of years. There’s work for wayland on newer nvidia cards, but it’s mostly still spotty.

        •  milkjug   ( @milkjug@beehaw.org ) OPEnglish
          2•9 months ago

          Yeah! Thanks for the input too, the 3080Ti I’ve been struggling with getting Arch or Tumbleweed to work without compromise but it’s always little gotchas like Wayland visual-glitching or VAAPI not working in browsers or graphical.target refusing to start if i915 is not blacklisted. The overall experience is just slightly more pleasant than gouging my eyes out with a rusty spoon.