

I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.
Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.
From what I’ve heard, ROCm may be finally getting out of its infancy; at the very least, I think by the time we get something useful, local, and ethical, it will be pretty well-developed.
Honestly, though, I’m in the same boat as you and actively try to avoid most AI stuff on my laptop. The only “AI” thing I use is I occasionally do an image upscale. I find it kind of useless on photos, but it’s sometimes helpful when doing vector traces on bitmap graphics with flat colors; Inkscape’s results aren’t always good with lower resolution images, so putting that specific kind of graphic through “cartoon mode” upscales sometimes improves results dramatically for me.
Of course, I don’t have GPU ML acceleration, so it just runs on the CPU; it’s a bit slow, but still less than 10 minutes.