I have nvidia and intel gpus working simultaneously - I thought this was supposed to be impossible

[Pheeble]

I have an intel i7-4790K cpu with integrated intel gpu, and an Nvidia GTX 970 gpu.

I have previously tried enabling both the nvidia and the intel gpus simultaneously in the BIOS, but I could never get any Linux distro to work with both enabled.

A few days ago I read a suggestion about setting the intel as the first gpu in the BIOS, so I tried that in Linux Mint Mate 18.3, and to my surprise it worked! I had to make a couple of small adjustments to xorg.conf to get it just the way I want, but I now have 4 monitors - 3 on the nvidia and 1 on the intel - tiled side-by-side to make a single desktop so I can move the cursor and drag windows from any monitor to any other monitor. As far as I can tell everything is working correctly, including Steam games and gpu rendering in Blender.

I have always read that this is impossible in Linux, but clearly it isn't. So how does this work so easily in Mint when it doesn't work at all in other distros?

[Pierre]

well - - nothing is impossible, per sec, but it can often be difficult to achieve.

so, in order to know what you did, and whilst it's still fresh in your memory:
- - can you write a Tutorial on what you did, to get this working ?.
there will certainly be others, who would like to do the same thing, as you have.

[Pheeble]

can you write a Tutorial on what you did, to get this working ?.
there will certainly be others, who would like to do the same thing, as you have.

No problem. Tutorial created at viewtopic.php?f=42&t=265946

P.S. I have since found that this method also works easily on a new default installation of Xubuntu 16.04.4.

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