Hi folks,

I'm again on the market for a new laptop and before shelling out the bucks I would like to learn about your experiences.

I intend to run Slackware-current on it.

My question is, which graphic chipsets give the least trouble in Slackware?

I understand that by using Intel graphics I don't need any proprietary driver software.

If I would choose to go with an AMD processor, what would be the options for it? Ideally, as I said before, I would like to avoid proprietary drivers.

If I have to go proprietary, what would be the best options for both Intel and AMD?

Thanks in advance!

Do you plan on gaming? If not, honestly, if you're thinking Intel processor, then intel IGP is cheapest, and easiest to work with.

If you're going AMD processor, current works with the open source amdgpu in almost all cases (I've seen a couple where something went wrong on upgrading from 14.2 to current, but I don't RECALL seeing issues anytime recently of new installs of current not working with amdgpu).

If you absolutely want to have a discrete card, then the EASIEST solution is to get a AMD Polaris based card, aka RX580/RX590. While not the highest performance, they work out of the box with amdgpu without tweaking anything, and they're cheap to buy (they do consume some fairly decent power).

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Thanks for the answer Timothy!

No, I don't except for some fairly old games: Descent 2, FreeSpace 2, Quake 4 would be the most advanced games I would run.

I'm not really looking for a discrete card. I just want something which would run OK without too much tweaking (basically like Intel) and which would support 3D acceleration for all those nice Plasma desktop effects.

Thanks! I'll take these suggestions into account.

Just as an FYI I don't use my laptop much but when I do I choose DosEquis...OOOPS! wrong commercial! ... all joking aside I have a rather ancient in computer years Thinkpad T60 that came with a mobile nVidia Quadro and it is superbly stable and remarkably high performance with the nvidia proprietary driver and perhaps most importantly on the T60 which I have nicknamed "Blast Furnace", the video card contributes very little to heat. The Core 2 Duo however is a torch when put to strenuous work. People don't believe how old it is. It's a beast.

I like Intel chipsets.

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14.2 is a bit too old for decent AMD/ATI Polaris and Vega performance via open source drivers. AMD didn't add most of the kernel improvements until 4.18/4.19 kernel. 15.0 (current, 4.18.x? or 5.x) will have all the eye candy for AMD based laptops with nice 3D performance. AMD CPU/GPU laptop will be a good bang-for-yer-buck choice.

Intel, esp. the newer 6000 or Iris GPUs is a good performer out if the box. I have a number of older intelhd 4000/5000 boxes here that can play quite a few older titles, as well as some newer ones, adequately; Not sure about Quake4 though ;-)

the Intel CPU is a bit hotter and pricey compared to AMD. For the newer AMD CPUs, performance is about the same and better for some multithreading.

If I were buying: AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 laptop with Vega GPU. Since Slackware 15.0 will be out "real soon now..."

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I hope so. Tomorrow marks three years since the release of Slackware 14.2. Are we there yet?

I wouldn't be afraid of current. Sure, things might break (as we saw a week ago with cairo), but it's not catastrophic. If you're really concerned, check the forums before updating, so a few hours after a patch hits. If you're relatively competent with Slackware, have good system administration habits, you should be OK with current at this point in time. Just keep in mind that things will likely break, especially 3rd party packages.

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Thanks everyone for the helpful advice.

Seconded. In my experience and as I said before, -current is way more stable than other distros' stable releases.

... and it isn't as if we are forced to choose one or the other. It is rather easy and a common practice for me to install "Slackware Stable Release" as my Main and a small, by today's drive standards, bootable partition for Current. That arrangement can be fun, useful and even a "lifesaver".

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My only complaint with -current is the additional time it takes to maintain it. Keeping up with changelogs and then recompiling any 3rd-party programs when stuff breaks takes extra effort. When I run -current, it is typically due to hardware or software requiring newer versions than what's on the stable release, but I tend to not update them after that, because I just don't have the extra time to dedicate towards it. There's days where I can't even sit at my computer at home because of how busy life is right now.

My HTPC is running -current (since I have a Ryzen APU), but I haven't updated it since in was installed at the end of May. That being said, it runs extremely well and is very stable.

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hear the hybrid intel chips can be troublesome but sounds like others here have more experience with them.
I have a AMD 8core/8thread cpu with Geforce GTX 1050 and it runs Battletech very well with proprietary driver. got a laptop with amd hybrid cpu/gpu and it handles the same game well open source drivers pretty 3d intensive.

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Get AMD CPU and GPU if you can, and use -current. Don't need to mess with any drivers, and all Plasma desktop effects work.

Nvidia chips (for example my GTX 1060) have some issues with Plasma effects. Most have been fixed but I ran into a couple that were annoying (unable to drag Steam client windows, alt+tabbing causes flickering, ctrl+shift+n for a new window in Chromium would make my monitor flash weird graphics like if the GPU was malfunctioning).

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