You can use the nouveau driver, which is supported and works well. Or you could sell your card and get an AMD one. If not, there's nothing wrong with sticking to i3+X11 until a more convenient time.

Nouveau is useless for a card like the 1080Ti, you get 10% of the performance and much worse energy efficiency.

Yes, I also dislike nvidia but a few years ago AMD was absolutely awful under Linux.

Yeah, not much wrong with i3 but I really like what you're doing with Sway. :)

What was true a few years ago has little bearing on what's true now. People buying new cards should be buying AMD. If your current circumstances don't make this possible for you, though, then there's nothing wrong with staying on X.

> Yes, I also dislike nvidia but a few years ago AMD was absolutely awful under Linux.

I can assure you that these days are gone. I just got a new Thinkpad with a Ryzen APU and nearly [1] everything worked out of the box. The R9 Nano in my desktop also works perfectly with the AMDGPU driver.

[1] "Nearly" because I needed to add "iommu=soft" to the kernel parameters to get Linux to boot.

I use nouveau on my 960, and the performance is pretty much the same. 10% seems like a big overstatement.

It very much depends upon the generation, the 1000 series cards aren't well supported but they do work.

Unfortunately that's the world we live in. You can either keep your nvidia card and have the best hardware, or you can vote with your wallet and have a lack-luster experience. Pretty much been the story of using Linux Desktop for a long time.

Your experience is not lackluster with non-nvidia cards. These days AMD cards are competetive in both price and performance.

I bought my 1080Ti two years ago and have custom watercooling on it. I can spend a lot of money now and get an AMD card that's a bit slower and consumes much more power. Sure, I should be voting with my wallet but it's not a cheap vote.

What is your use case for external GPU? If you need a good GPU for gaming on Linux, it is better to sell your 1080ti and get a AMD RX580 or even AMD Vega. If it is for CUDA, you can use your CPU's IGP or buy a cheap AMD GPU for desktop and only use NVIDIA for CUDA.

So unless you don't have a IGP and your motherboard doesn't have spare PCI-e slots, it is better to use a dual GPU approach of if you really need a NVIDIA card. Otherwise selling your NVIDIA card and buying a AMD one is a good choice.

Of course, YMMV and you know better than me what is good for you.

AMD cards are not slower, but they do get somewhat worse performance per watt.

There might be an option to swap your nvidia card with your integrated GPU through some kernel modesetting scripts if your bios doesn't disable the integrated GPU.

Can you not run sway with an Nvidia card?

There are two Linux drivers for Nvidia GPUs: proprietary (nvidia) and open source (nouveau). Only the latter is supported by sway, and it has inferior performance and doesn't support newer cards well.

You can, but only with nouveau, which performs considerably worse. This is because Sway only supports GBM and nVidia only supports EGLStreams.