Current state of Optimus (Nvidia x AMD) and Lenovo Legions

Lounge Linux lounge
1

Hello everyone!

I know there is lots of users who use Optimus and mobile dGPUs on this forum. And someone there might be even using Lenovo Legion series laptops as their daily drive.

Recently I bought myself a Lenovo Legion Pro to get a powerful yet mobile PC and I’m currently using as my daily drive on-the-go. But my main concern is that my OS on this laptop is still Windows 11.
I want to switch to Cachy as on my main system or Endeavour but there is so little information about the state of this laptops on Linux as of 2026. (Or maybe I’m just dumb and didn’t search properly)

So before erasing Windows and installing one of the distros I mentioned above, I want to ask the Endeavour community about:

  1. Current state of Nvidia Optimus on Wayland (especially Nvidia dGPU + AMD iGPU)
  2. Current state of proprietary Lenovo (IdeaPads included) hardware support on Linux
  3. Where to get a proper OpenRGB compatibility list (The website is outdated even for nightly builds)
  4. Good alternatives to LegionSpace (in terms of OLED saving features and RGB configuration) and Lenovo Vantage
  5. A good alternative to UXTU

Will be glad to hear your opinions and thoughts

2

To your 2nd point: IdeaPad 3 (17ALC6) works with Zorin (Ubuntu) and EOS, the responsiveness is snappy, touchpad two-finger, three-finger input, camera, sound, microphone out of the box, haven’t touched any driver installation in both distros.

Untested, I suspect the OEM license key for Windows 11 cannot be ported to a VirtualBox copy for occasional Win-11 virtual machines on the very same machine, but in Linux.

I would argue newer IdeaPads, Slims etc. are equally well supported.

3

UPD:

For those who maybe will need this in future.
I did some testing and figured out all the necessary features and created a checklist.

Lenovo Legion Checklist (for now only applies to 16AFR10H w/ R9 9955HX3D & RTX 5080):

[✓] DMI / model confirmed
- LENOVO 83RU
- Legion Pro 7 16AFR10H
- Product SKU: LENOVO_MT_83RU_BU_idea_FM_Legion Pro 7 16AFR10H

[✓] BIOS / EC visibility confirmed
- BIOS version: SMCN19WW
- BIOS date: 11/25/2025
- EC firmware release: 1.17

[✓] Internal OLED/eDP panel works
- 2560x1600 @ 240 Hz detected
- KDE/kscreen sees the internal panel correctly

[✓] External monitor via USB-C DP Alt Mode works
- External monitor detected as DP-1
- Enabled and connected
- 2560x1440 @ 180 Hz active
- USB-C 10Gbps port with DP 2.1 Alt Mode works for display output

[✓] USB-C visibility confirmed
- USB Type-C class devices visible
- Thunderbolt / USB4 not applicable for this configuration

[✓] fwupd / LVFS works
- fwupd installed and working
- LVFS firmware update path supported
- Firmware update path through Linux is covered

[✓] RGB Support
- RGB is covered through OpenRGB pipeline

[✗] LenovoLegionLinux support
- Current status: not supported for Legion Pro 7 16AFR10H / 83RU yet
- Unsupported until explicit model support is added

[✗] Battery conservation without LLL
- Battery is detected correctly
- No conservation_mode exposed
- No charge_control_start_threshold exposed
- No charge_control_end_threshold exposed
- No obvious charge-threshold sysfs controls found
- Current status: battery conservation is not available without LLL

[✗] OLED
- OLED Care is not supported until LLL

[✓] NVIDIA driver works
- RTX 5080 Laptop GPU detected
- Kernel driver in use: nvidia
- nvidia-smi works
- Driver version: 590.48.01
- CUDA version: 13.1

[✓] Vulkan sees NVIDIA GPU
- vulkaninfo sees NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU
- Vulkan driver: NVIDIA

[✓] prime-run helper
- prime-run is available and works properly

[✓] PRIME OpenGL offload
- Available and works properly

[✓] Kernel sleep capability exposed
- /sys/power/state: freeze mem disk
- /sys/power/mem_sleep: s2idle [deep]
- suspend-to-RAM state “mem” available

[?] Real sleep / resume behavior
- Needs manual testing (works for now but depends on model):
- sleep/resume without external monitor
- sleep/resume with external monitor
- sleep/resume after closing/opening lid
- NVIDIA still available after resume
- external monitor still works after resume

The verdict is:
As soon as LLL will add support for this model, it will be fully usable in Linux