The most annoying thing about using Linux on my laptop is that the HDMI doesn’t work out of the box because by default, “hybrid graphics” means your nVidia GPU won’t be turned on until it’s told to run a single program using PRIME offloading.

My system is an Acer Nitro 15 with a Ryzen 4600H and an nVidia 1650Ti

If you want to get HDMI working, which imo should just be standard functionality in a 2023 Linux laptop, you’ll want to go through these steps.

  1. Uncomment #WaylandEnable=False in /etc/gdm/custom.conf - We’ll need to log in with “Gnome on Xorg” to use the hybrid graphics mode. It still lets us use Wayland if we want, though, so if something on X11 breaks you have a fallback.
  2. Install gdm-prime from Pacman. It lets the graphics switcher app hook into x11 to control the active graphics profile.
  3. Install optimus-manager from Pacman. This will let us switch to hybrid graphics mode.
  4. Edit /usr/share/optimus-manager.conf and set startup_mode, startup-auto-battery-mode, startup-auto-extpower-mode to your desired options. Hybrid was what you need to set to get HDMI working without extra setup.
  5. Restart the system.
  6. Confirm your system has set your desired option with optimus-manager --status (should be hybrid).

Extra steps for the reader.

  1. Set up power management for the nvidia GPU. My battery probably will suffer but gaming laptops usually stay plugged in anyway :P You can do this but I’m not sure how to get it working and don’t wanna break anything.

  2. Explain how to do this with KDE. Shouldn’t be hard just dont do step 1. and check the optimus-manager git repo for tips on doing this on KDE Manjaro.

  3. Figure out how to do this on Wayland. X11 is going out of style and I don’t wanna be stuck on X11 forever - GNOME gets so buggy with it ;_;