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Now this is strange, because I've had exactly the opposite experience with the same hardware. I've gotten both a (Thinkpad) W530 and a P50 working fully (with four monitors!) with their dual-GPU hardware out of the box with Linux Mint 18 (Cinnamon), which is based on Ubuntu 16.04. Incidentally, Windows 10 shit itself with a simple ATI 7990 and the onboard NIC on an Asus motherboard when I tried to install it a couple…
I bought a $360 Thinkpad w520 quad core mostly to see if I could move from linux in VMs to it being a daily driver. That was two weeks ago. I'm amazed at how well it works: this laptop has a nightmare graphics setup (Nvidia Optimus) but it works very well when you pick a card in the bios; the Optimus setup doesn't work very well. On the other hand, it isn't even supported in Windows 10: I tried it anyway, and it keep…
Re: The Joy of Linux Desktop Environments
#181I have it working with two DP monitors and the laptop screen. But this only works in XFCE not Unity, even though I use lightdm with XFCE. Optimus actually probably would have worked out of the box except that I added a brightness control xorg.conf tweak which broke Optimus (the problem with 2011 hardware is a lot of neolithic advice). With 16.04.2's 4.8 kernel and Nvidia 367 driver that tweak isn't necessary anyway.