This whole Nvidia business has made me think about getting a non Nvidia card. I found what - going by price and specs - seems to be a promising choice, the Intel card in the title. Of course, the big question is do these Intel cards play nice with Linux/X11/Wayland? Rummaging around makes it look like 2 years ago this would have been a bad purchase, but they seem to have gotten their act together. True? Thanks for any input.
Intel Arc A cards were totally fine on Linux/X11/Wayland two years ago.
Depends on the scenario though. Are they great gaming cards? No. Are they great productivity cards? Yes.
Thanks. I play older games so the fact it doesn’t do well with modern graphics demands is not an issue.
Which specific “Nvidia business” are you referring to @serutan?
Each option, whether it’s Nvidia, AMD or Intel, has its pros and cons.
AMD for example, has fully open source drivers, but (as such) can’t support HDMI 2.1 (or higher) spec. Not all displays, TV’s in particular, support DisplayPort which is otherwise a good alternative. At a glance though, there may be some hacky advancements there:
Intel in my opinion doesn’t yet have maturity and an established position in the mid to high-end GPU market. My caution would be that when compared to the alternative, they are much more likely to simply drop the product line and support for it, altogether. I hope for competition sake though, that doesn’t happen.
Nvidia provide CUDA technology, which is great for productivity tasks, but less important for gamers. For professional use cases, I’d be hard pressed to walk past that. The kernel module is now open-source, but there is still a closed source part of the drivers, which is both a good and a bad thing. The bad being, well, it’s closed so it remains something of a mystery, but the good is that it permits HDMI 2.1 support, unlike AMD.
I ran an A750 for three years until December 2025. I mostly cared about desktop productivity work with gaming as an addition bonus. The desktop experience was very good, since it officially runs on the old and mature i915 driver (the newer Xe driver is available as “experimental” with some caveats). For gaming I mostly picked up older games on steam sales, and that was fine 95% of the time.
I have a 1050, and I’m nervous about having to depend on the AUR for the driver.
Not sure if this is correct but it’s what i have read.
Essentially, AMD hardware has the capability, but the restriction is in the open-source driver software on Linux, not the hardware itself.
Open-source AMD drivers (amdgpu) generally do not support high-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 features (4K@120Hz) because the required code for certification cannot be released in an open-source format.
Edit: This is due to licensing restrictions with the HDMI Forum, which restricts open-source implementations.
Yes that’s right 
That’s a good point of clarification.
You’re right on the AMD side. The Intel Arc A series does provide it by having an hardware bridge and therefore not relying on a closed sourced Linux driver feature.
I didn’t know that. I’m not that familiar with Intels Arc Gpu.
I’m not sure if it’s any consolation, but with respect to the AUR, you are in control. You are free to download the AUR package (yay -G nvidia-580xx-dkms) and edit and maintain that as you see fit, on your local system. The driver files don’t come from the AUR, they come from the official Nvidia source.
In that respect, it’s not really any different to how on Windows you’d need to download version 580 of the driver for an older GPU.
Yes…as I have the GTX 1060 which is the same. I’m using the 580xx from the AUR.
Yeah, same here for an older Asus laptop I manage with Nvidia GPU. No issues so far.
Yes … It’s surprising as I have been using KDE on Wayland with my Nvidia for quite some time without any issues.
Well, I was going to go with the AUR driver for the time being, but I thought it would be prudent to research alternatives. Thanks to all for the info/help.
What about Display Port 2.1? I’m not sure that restriction applies does it?
DisplayPort is an open standard, so no license issues there. It’s simply a matter of whether the GPU + cable + display supports it.
That’s what I thought. In my opinion I would opt for DP even if having to use an HDMI adapter. I’m just not sure if some adapters have limits on their abilities.
As a last resort, adaptors are an option. Something can be lost in using them though.
Things just generally run smoother display wise, when an adaptor isn’t needed.
Like if someone is using a high spec display, but can’t be bothered buying a new cable so opt for using an adaptor instead, I’d recommend reconsidering the new cable.
For the sake of general Linux support, it’s probably also worth ensuring any monitor purchase is able to fully utilise DisplayPort.
This kind of what i was getting at. But if a TV and if it only has HDMI maybe an adapter might work.