If you only ever want to use the laptop's screen then you can indeed run the X1E on the intel gpu only. Unfortunately the display ports are hardwired to the discrete gpu so you need run the nvidia chip in that case.
Confirming this. When I bought X1E it was a pain to get 18.04 working. But 18.04 on this device was for me the worst Linux experience since the 90s :-( It is probably because of Nvidia, but I blame Gnome too - the latency got worse than 20 years ago. I just want to be able to type on the terminal and have a browser.
Am now to leave Ubuntu, that I used for the last 15 years or so. Thanks for helping me out that long. Going to NixOS and hope it will make my life easier, even if the start is more involved.
