prime-select-envycontrol

Compatibility wrapper that provides a prime-select interface using envycontrol for the TUXEDO Control Center.

⚠️ Early prototype

This project is an initial scratch implementation. It currently works in basic scenarios but has not been thoroughly tested yet.

Expect rough edges, missing checks, and potential bugs. The code and behavior may change significantly as the project evolves.

Motivation

The intention of this project was to enable the GPU switching options in the TUXEDO Control Center tray icon on Arch-based distributions.
Since the Control Center expects Ubuntu's prime-select from nvidia-prime, these options normally do not appear on distributions that do not ship it.

This wrapper provides a compatible prime-select command that internally uses envycontrol.

Related Projects

• https://github.com/canonical/nvidia-prime
• https://github.com/bayasdev/envycontrol
• https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-control-center

How it works

The wrapper exposes the prime-select CLI and forwards commands to envycontrol.

prime-select command	envycontrol equivalent
intel	envycontrol --switch integrated
nvidia	envycontrol --switch nvidia
on-demand	envycontrol --switch hybrid
query	envycontrol --query

Additionally the file

/var/lib/ubuntu-drivers-common/requires_offloading

must exist so the TUXEDO Control Center detects offloading support.

Requirements

• NVIDIA drivers
• envycontrol
• TUXEDO Control Center

Installation

Install the wrapper:

sudo install -m 755 prime-select /usr/local/bin/prime-select

Create the offloading marker:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/ubuntu-drivers-common
sudo touch /var/lib/ubuntu-drivers-common/requires_offloading

Usage

Query mode:

prime-select query

Switch GPU:

sudo prime-select intel
sudo prime-select nvidia
sudo prime-select on-demand

Internally these commands are translated to envycontrol.