I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
One thing here, the open source Nvidia drivers still have a lot of performance issues. It’s only fairly recently that NVIDIA has opened their drivers up enough to allow any kind of reasonable performance from open source drivers, and getting them up to par is still a work in progress. So stick with the propietary drivers for now, but keep an eye on the new open source driver, NVK.
(As far as distro recs go, I recently started using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and am really liking it, but I don’t have enough experience with it yet to make an informed recommendation)
One thing here, the open source Nvidia drivers still have a lot of performance issues. It’s only fairly recently that NVIDIA has opened their drivers up enough to allow any kind of reasonable performance from open source drivers, and getting them up to par is still a work in progress. So stick with the propietary drivers for now, but keep an eye on the new open source driver, NVK.
(As far as distro recs go, I recently started using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and am really liking it, but I don’t have enough experience with it yet to make an informed recommendation)