I recently bought a “gaming laptop”, therefore it boards an Nvidia GPU and an Intel “GPU”. I have managed to install Ubuntu 16.04, but I have some problems with the way Ubuntu is using the GPUs. I found that there's two ways to make those GPUs coexist : whether I can use Nvidia Prime to select which GPU I want to use for the current session, or I can use Bumblebee to use the Nvidia GPU on specific programs.
First, I tried the prime option, as it seems to be the recommended solution on my favorite Ubuntu forum, but the thing is that even if I select the Intel GPU on Nvidia control panel, it is not “completely” disabled, and keeps using power, resulting in overheating and poor battery life.
As for bumblebee, I just gave up after two afternoons trying to make it work.
First, I want to highlight that I already have a windows partition for gaming and thus I absolutely don't need to use the Nvidia GPU on Ubuntu, which I use for daily computing and for work.
So as long as I use a laptop and I want it to have the maximum battery life, I'm trying to find a way to disable the Nvidia GPU to extend battery life.
Is there a way to do that on Ubuntu or any other distro ? (I have no problem changing distro if it solves my issue.) By the way, disabling Nvidia GPU in bios is something I can't do since I'll have to flash a custom bios in order to be able to do it.
Thanks for your help !
