Getting Bumblebee to run on Ubuntu 18.04

Source: Pixabay

After fixing my problems with Intel GPUs, I updated to Ubuntu 18.04 and tried to install Bumblebee. The update itself was anything but painless: the system was updated, but for some reason I couldn't install Cinnamon (my preferred desktop environment) or even GNOME (the default one). The problem was surprisingly not from the graphics driver, but rather the from the package manager. Anyway since that didn't work, I made a clean install and the the Ubuntu 17.10 tweaks to get the Intel GPU running, also work for Ubuntu 18.04.

The other good news it that Bumbelbee is working under Ubuntu 18.04, the bad news is that it's not working very well. What I mean by that is, that for example some applications start, but you can't see them or it also happend that some applications just don't start. In general the development of Bumblebee is pretty dead right now, the latest commit (to the development branch) was made in January 2017, to the master branch in 2013. If you look at the history of the project they wrote that project will be considered done, when Nvidia drivers for Optimus are mature. You can argue if that's the case, but in the last years the Nvidia drivers for Linux improved a lot with regard to Optimus systems, so the project lost a bit of its purpose. I personally find that a bit sad, since unlike the official solution, Bumblebee allowed to switch the GPU during runtime.

However, if you still want to use Bumblebee on Ubuntu 18.04 check out this answer from StackOverflow, it should help you getting Bumblebee running. When installing Bumblebee don't forget to also install the package bumblebee-nvidia: sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia. If you are running a 64-bit Ubuntu you should change LibraryPath and XorgModulePath to LibraryPath=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/nvidia/xorg:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/primus and XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/nvidia/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules, as described here.

That should get Bumblebee working, however because it isn't really up-to-date anymore it doesn't really run well, as I described above. I didn't run any benchmarks, but since some games I'd like to run don't work anyway (in my case I wasn't able to get Warframe to run with Bumblebee), it is a bit pointless for me to check the performance. According to one issue on GitHub the performance suffers as well, compared to just using the Nvidia driver.