Hey all, I’m thinking about getting the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16ARX8 and want to know how it handles Linux, especially Fedora Atomic editions like Sericea or Kinoite running on Wayland with Hyprland. The specs look great with a Ryzen 9 7945HX, 32GB DDR5 RAM (upgradeable), 1TB NVMe SSD, an RTX 4060 8GB GPU, and a 16″ WQXGA 240Hz display. Since I’m mainly a backend developer who also plays games (Steam, indie titles, retro, modded stuff), I want to run Linux daily using the integrated AMD 780M GPU for development and desktop tasks, while using the NVIDIA 4060 only for gaming. My questions are: Does anyone run Linux (preferably Fedora + Wayland) on this machine? How’s gaming performance, battery life, thermals, and GPU switching? Does the 240Hz screen work well on Wayland? Has anyone tried Hyprland with this setup? And how’s general hardware compatibility for Wi-Fi, audio, suspend, etc.? Any insights on whether this laptop is a solid Linux daily driver and gaming hybrid or if I should look for alternatives?
3 Answers
I’ve got a Legion with hybrid graphics (NVIDIA + AMD integrated) and it runs nicely on Linux. You can use tools like optimus-manager to easily switch between GPUs, and it works fine even on Wayland. Gaming performance is solid when you switch to the NVIDIA card, and battery life is decent if you stick with the integrated AMD GPU for most tasks.
Heads up if you go Wayland on NVIDIA — especially with Flatpak games — you might hit some annoying issues. NVIDIA’s driver currently causes problems with Flatpak games, sometimes showing just a black screen with audio still running, or throwing OpenGL/Vulkan errors until a native host app runs first. It’s a known pain point and kinda frustrating because X11 sessions don’t have this problem. You might have to run a small 3D app like vkcube on startup or after waking from suspend to get things back to normal.
From what I’ve seen, if Lenovo officially offers a Linux option on their site for this model, that’s usually a good sign everything works smoothly. You’ll probably need to manually pick when to use the dedicated NVIDIA GPU in games because automatic switching can be hit or miss sometimes.
Ah got it, so game-specific GPU switching might be the way to go rather than relying on automated methods. Thanks for clarifying!
Nice, thanks for the tip about optimus-manager! I’m glad to hear hybrid switching can be smooth with it.