In this Ubuntu release cycle I worked, among other things, on improving user experience with hybrid systems and proprietary graphics drivers. The aim was to make it easier to enable the discrete card when in need of better performance i.e. when the integrated card wouldn’t be enough.

In 13.10 I focused mainly on enablement, making sure that by installing one extra package together with the driver, users would end up with a fully working system with no additional configuration required on their end.

As for 12.04.3, I backported my work from 13.10 and I also made sure that Jockey (the restricted drivers manager in Precise) detects systems with hybrid graphics, recommends the correct driver – hiding any drivers which may support the card but not in a hybrid graphics context – and installs the extra package when users decide to enable the discrete card. The installation process is very straightforward, however, if you’re still using the old kernel/X stack, Jockey won’t show any drivers. The backported stack from Raring (which comes by default with 12.04.3) is required.

There are some known issues, which will be fixed in a near future.

If you would like to try this work on your system, you can find the instructions here.