I just got a replacement laptop, as my previous Thinkpad T580 started to freeze after > 10 minutes of usage. Luckily my company just replaced the thing, so I didn’t have to think about anything else than reinstalling (since i don’t use coorporate Windows image) and copy in my backup.

The T580 has a Nvidia MX150 GPU alongside with the Intel. I had some issues getting this to work on my old laptop, when I initially installed it with Ubuntu 18.04. Working with the Nvidia driver, pre-summer 2019’ish on Linux, reminded me of trying to get the xserver to work some decades ago. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, pleaae watch Bisqwit trying with SlackWare 3.0 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EanGvOBhr9s

Well, lets forget about the past and watch ahead. Since Ubuntu 19.10 was released, all this Nvidia stuff should be much easier, as Nvidia drivers are now build into Linux and Ubuntu is working to make everything easier.

During installation I selected install third party drivers, and that should more or less be it – it should work. But of course it did not, otherwise I would not have been writing this. Somehow it seemed like Ubuntu was not recognizing the GPU. The prime profile application gave me an option to choose what GPU to use, but it kept using the Intel even though I told it to use Nvidia. After some time of debugging, I learned, that in order to use the Nvidia GPU you have to disable secure boot. I rebooted to BIOS, disabled secure boot, and everything is now working as expected.