In testing the Gigabyte Aero 15 (see FL-7412), I now have experience with a laptop with a more advanced Optimus configuration.

Up until now, I have been using Thinkpads with NVIDIA, which have a BIOS setting to essentially toggle the active GPU. When you use these Thinkpads (Thinkpad P1 Gen 1 is what I have), xrandr --listproviders will list only one graphics provider, either Intel or NVIDIA, based on your BIOS setting.

On the Aero 15, two providers are listed when dedicated graphics are enabled. This means that you can use advanced functionality and actually use one GPU for some things and another GPU for other things. Our documentation doesn't adequately cover this scenario.

In my test configuration, to get graphics working, I enabled the NVIDIA graphics, installed the NVIDIA drivers, and enabled the gfxcard-intel-iris mix-in and got that up and running. When this is done, the X server will enable "Prime offloading" automatically. What this means is that it will use the Intel GPU for everything, unless you tell it to use the NVIDIA GPU.