Blender 2.79 and 2.8 on Linux with bumblebee without a hassle on laptops Intel+nVidia

It’s not a crypto ad of any Linux distro, probably can be done on any other but with a lot of work and without any certainty of luck. The example below is just ready as stock without any additional package installations.

Everybody who want to work with Blender 2.79 and 2.8 under Linux: try Manjaro distribution (other distros like debian based need additional install process and are kinda risky as it doesn’t work in all cases and can break system if You’re not more advanced user), choose some from their flagship spins. KDE checked and works great. You may try it straight as live USB and when it will boot and ask which driver to install choose ‘nonfree’. It installs bumblebee latest nVidia and Intel graphic drivers :slight_smile: So, it uses Intel by default and uses nVidia on demand. To run Blender with CUDA just go to the folder where Blender is unpacked, open terminal from that point and type:

sudo optirun ./blender

to get to nVidia settings, type:

sudo optirun -b none nvidia-settings -c :8

Just to add that there’s no screen flickering like with nVidia Prime driver which is annoying in daily use (issue with screen synchronisation).

Under Linux I’ve found scenes are rendered faster than under Windows with same settings using “GPU compute” in Cycles in render tab and nVidia + Intel CPU enabled as openCL/CUDA devices in Blender preferences. EEVEE engine would compile and work slowly with only Intel integrated graphic enabled if Blender was run without this ‘optirun’ option.

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Yesterday I was trying to deal with Pop OS - it was a couple of hours of pain without any result on my laptop.
Manjaro is the easiest and comfortable way, especially if you are familiar with Arch - everything works out of the box.

Sadly, NVidia doesn’t care much about users, and there’s no really good and reliable way for many years.