Not sure if this is a good place to ask for help, but I have scoured the internet and no one has a solution, so hopefully this question helps me as well as others.
I'm trying to get my computer to run at its best when on Hyprland.
I have an MSI Raider GE76 which has an Nvidia GTX 3080 Mobile and an Intel Tiger Lake CPU with integrated graphics.
I typically have an external display over display port, an Ultrawide 3440x1440@60Hz, and the internal laptop display is on eDP at 1920x1080@360Hz.
Note tho that while I often have the dual screen setup, I do need to be able to go to just the Intel display.
The Nvidia GPU drives all outputs (DP, HDMI, Thunderbolt) EXCEPT for the eDP which is connected to the Intel card.
On X11, I could use reverse prime sync to use the Nvidia card for everything and just have the Intel card draw whatever the Nvidia card renders. This worked well.
Unfortunately there isn't anything like that for Wayland, and I don't have a hardware switch to put the eDP on the nvidia side of things.
This means that I have to use the default prime modes to run stuff on the nvidia card which makes the second screen incredibly laggy.
Now, I can disable the i915 module and the external display becomes buttery smooth, but I can't use my built-in display (which means I also can't use the display when I'm not connected to the external monitor).
How can I get both to work well on Wayland?
Can I run the external display exclusively on Nvidia and the internal on Intel with Prime?
That could work, but idk if that's possible.
What's the optimal way to set up an external display on Wayland with and Nvidia hybrid-graphics laptop?
Bc right now I'm thinking of just going back to X11 and praying it gets enough support to live until I can get a decent Wayland config.
I don't have such a laptop, so I can't really speak for experience, but I can tell you what I know.
You definitely can use prime to render a program on the dgpu and display it on the igpu, this requires basically no configuration at all on wayland, I even did it on my desktop computer when Wayland didn't run on Nvidia. But I don't know if you can or why you would use the dgpu for everything instead of only selected programs (games).
What you really need is a compositor that properly uses both GPUs and can use the ports of both at the same time, hyperlaneld might just be bad at that. Gnome should be in a better position so you can start from here and see if gnome behaves better.
Also, are you sure you want to use a tiling compositor on a gaming laptop? Wouldn't it be a better experiment to just go with gnome? It's visually polished and goes well with trackpads.
I can't go back to moving windows around by hand. It's so tedious. I can't stand it anymore. Even on Windows which I use for work I always install FancyWM to achieve some sense of tiling. It's just imo a superior way to use a computer.
That said, GNOME has the fantastic Pop Shell 2 which functions similar to Hyprland or i3, so that's fine on GNOME. Honestly, I'm hopeful for COSMIC and plan to try it out once it gets out of Alpha.
The problem I have with GNOME is I always end up breaking it in a way that I can't restore it. Some extension or GTK theme tweak or something, even when uninstalled, always seems to get it stuck in a bad state. It doesn't like customization. KDE does, but it doesn't have as good tiling support (there's Polonium, which is... okay).
Perhaps I'll try it again tho. I've used GNOME for several months at a time before, but I had problems when switching to Wayland a couple years ago initially (which I'm sure are fixed now).
Splitting the thread here. I personally used i3wm for more than a year and became white fast with it, then I had to use windows for a month and when I went back to i3 it was a pain, I couldn't do shit. It was at that moment I decided "why can't I just stop forcing myself to this PITA and just use the mouse faster?" And I never used a tiling VM again, personally I use kde on desktop and gnome on laptop.
But, I can see the appeal of automatic tiling, so I raise you this: scrollable compositors. You get both the benefits of automatic positioning and oc moving things in and out of the way, without keeping track and managing 10 virtual desktops
Scrollables are neat. I think Niri or KDE + Karousel might be useful to me. Thanks for the tip