Some weeks ago, here in the blog we comment on the request for support what the guys from Canonical did to the community and users from Ubuntu to help contribute some data about the way the system behaves with the private and open drivers for Nvidia cards.
Basically it's about doing some tests where you should test and report on what was happening with your hardware (with Nvidia video card).
One of these tests is on a liveCD and the other is during the installation process of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Braver or 18.10, finally the last one was installing the private drivers and then making the change to the free drivers and vice versa again.
From there you would only have to report if the whole process was successful or you ran into an error and report on it.
Now recently Ubuntu developer Alberto Milone is asking to all Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users and those who are testing version 18.10 who can, to help test Nvidia PRIME support on hybrid notebooks.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was the first LTS (Long Term Support) version of this system to be supplied to the environment by the default GNOME desktop instead of the Unity desktop, which was developed and maintained for some years by Canonical.
Ubuntu wants graphics improvements from Nvidia
With the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, hybrid laptop users (with Intel and Nvidia GPUs) lost the way Nvidia PRIME worked on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) series.
Now Ubuntu developer Alberto Milone invites all members of hybrid laptops running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Braver) operating system or future Ubuntu 10.18 (Cosmic Sepia) operating systems to check Nvidia PRIME compatibility.
He and his team successfully released a patch for a bug that increases power consumption. by using profile saving with the Nvidia GPU power and prevented users from switching between power profiles to exit.
nvidia ubuntu
In a post on his blog, Alberto Milone said:
“Both problems should be fixed on Ubuntu 18.10, and I have backported my work to Ubuntu 18.04, which is now available for testing. If you are running ubuntu 18.04, have a hybrid laptop with an intel gpu and an nvidia (compatible with the nvidia 390 driver), we would like your feedback on the updates to ubuntu 18.04. «
That is, it is inviting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Braver users and what will be the next version of Ubuntu 18.10 (expected next month).
Owning a hybrid laptop with an integrated Intel GPU and a dedicated Nvidia GPU supported by proprietary Nvidia 390 graphics drivers, to test support for Nvidia PRIME
According to Alberto Milone, the logind fixes now available as compatibility with gdm3 (GNOME Display Manager) still needs some work.
However, note that if you are using LightDM or Between SDDM managers, Nvidia PRIME support may not work as expected.
Conclusion
Developer still working on some fixes to add support for these access managers, which it says will be available in the next update.
To test Nvidia PRIME support now, you can view the information available on Launchpad.
Finally we can see that Canonical and their development team are hard at work during these weeks in order to improve Ubuntu development and its performance with Nvidia graphics.
With this we can imagine or keep in mind that the next Ubuntu release that will be next month will come with many improvements for Nvidia graphics since from one moment to another they have focused too much on solving all the possible errors that this leads to.
At least this in a personal way and I think that to many Nvidia cardholders it can be a plus.