Bumblebee is an effort to make NVIDIA Optimus enabled laptops work in GNU/Linux systems. These laptops are built in such a way that the NVIDIA graphics card can be used on demand so that battery life is improved and temperature is kept low.

It disables the discrete graphics card if no client is detected, and starts an X server making use of NVIDIA card if requested then let software GL implementations (such as VirtualGL) copy frames to the visible display that runs on the integrated graphics. The ability to use discrete graphics depends on the driver: open source nouveau and proprietary nvidia.