Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1294 stars · 141 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Bumblebee is a daemon and client (rewritten in C) that manages NVIDIA Optimus hybrid graphics on Linux laptops, letting users run applications on the discrete GPU via optirun while powering it down when idle. It works with nouveau or proprietary NVIDIA drivers and back-ends like VirtualGL or Primus, with optional power management via bbswitch.

Use cases

• run games on the nvidia gpu of an optimus laptop on linux
• manage hybrid graphics power management on a laptop
• run an application with the discrete gpu using optirun
• turn off the nvidia gpu to save battery on linux
• set up nvidia optimus support on debian or arch
• use primus or virtualgl with an optimus laptop

When to choose

• you have an older NVIDIA Optimus laptop running Linux and need optirun/primus rendering
• you want automatic dGPU power-off when the discrete card is unused
• your distribution still packages Bumblebee and your kernel/hardware predates modern PRIME offload

When to avoid

• you have a newer laptop where built-in PRIME render offload and nvidia power management work
• you use Wayland, which Bumblebee does not support
• you need actively maintained software - the project is largely in maintenance mode

Facets

service · maturity maintenance

graphics configuration-management developer-tools operating-systems hardware graphics cli nvidia-optimus hybrid-graphics gpu-power-management optirun bbswitch primus virtualgl daemon linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee")