Dell Inspiron 15 (7559), Ubuntu 16.04 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M

I had purchased Dell  Inspiron 15 (7559) when I entered my current job at Navigo3. I was asked to buy Dell to keep same brand with other laptops in company. I made some research and only feasible option (SSD, 16GB RAM, …) was this one.

Unfortunately it is based on Intel Skylake which is not fully supported in Ubuntu 16.04 yet. It should be better with 4.8 kernel that should be backported in February 2017. However main issue is dedicated graphics. I have experiences various issues from freezing during boot, problems with suspend, setting resolution on multiple screens, etc. Because I mostly do web development, I don’t need dedicated graphic card. So I decided to switch off dedicated card and keep only Intel HD Graphics 530. It is quite easy:

Install bbswitch-dkms:

apt install bbswitch-dkms

Switch off NVIDIA card by appending following into /etc/modules

bbswitch load_state=0

Blacklist NVIDIA by appending following into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist nouveau 
blacklist nvidia

And finally update initial ramdisk by running

update-initramfs -u

After reboot only Intel should be enabled:

intel.png

Credits: http://askubuntu.com/a/709552/93726 (Sorry, I cannot upvote because I don’t have enough reputation points)

Tags:  DisplayLink  Ubuntu