video support
 

I'm going to be looking at a new laptop soon. I would prefer to choose one with:
1. at least a reasonably powerful video card.
2. a video card that is well supported (not Nvidia)
3. a video card that is well supported without many hours of work required.

Here is the think. I'd really like to switch back to Gentoo. The problem is that I hate the idea of having hardware only partially utilized, and setting up bumblebee on Gentoo. is a horribly painful process. One which I would rather avoid.

Can anyone recommend a good mobile card to look for? Preferably one tested with a Gentoo installation.

What do you mean with reasonably powerful? Reasonable for which purpose?
Also, in the near future Bumblebee will not be longer necessary for Optimus support, Nvidia officially works on Optimus support for Linux and has the needed basics for that already in the latest drivers.
But without knowing for what you need that videocard it is difficult to give proper advice.

If you want well supported and resonably powerful, you want to avoid AMD graphics like the plague. The open source drivers work well enough, but have almost no performance, and the proprietary drivers are complete, total garbage. If you are lucky enough to get them to actually install (in the last 2 years with my laptop with a AMD graphics chip, I've NEVER gotten the proprietary drivers to correctly install), they perform pretty good, but getting them to install is absolutely horrible.

Most of the programs I run on my laptop are cpu intensive, not necessarily gpu intensive so I don't need something crazy. I do use AutoCAD quite frequently which is somewhat demanding. I also use Avogadro from time to time on some rather large polymer chains.
Finally, I'm not much of a gamer. but every now and then I get in to something. It would be nice if I can run most games without them looking horrible.

However if the optimus problem is resolved there may be no reason to switch.

Hi:

Both my Desktop Pc and my laptop have ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards and have provided me with (what I need) good performace and I run a lot of applications that require a good graphics card-
-GIMP
Blender
-Inkscape and many others. Applications like 'AutoCad' should be well supported by a ATI/AMD card.

My brand new Sony Vaio does a sensation job when it comes to graphics performace and the general functionality is superb.
But I'm only one user elaborating on this brand.
Hewett Packard makes good laptops as well from what an associate of mine tells me.

Best Laptop For AutoCad:
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCA...T/td-p/3560772
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Compari...rds.130.0.html
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/mob...world-706673/3

:hattip:

Then maybe a system with one of AMD's higher end APUs, like the A10-5750, may be interesting for you.
Keep in mind that it is not resolved yet, but that Nvidia is working on it. From the latest driver's release notes: