Comment by WalterGR
8 years ago
It's 100% plug and play
Is it still necessary to research whether a piece of hardware is supported on Linux, and how well it's supported, before buying the hardware?
8 years ago
It's 100% plug and play
Is it still necessary to research whether a piece of hardware is supported on Linux, and how well it's supported, before buying the hardware?
The only hardware I've seen having problems recently were Macbooks. I'd research the model before I would try to put Linux on one. The ones having two graphics processors are really finicky, as I can attest to about my work laptop.
That said, I'd probably check out a laptop in general if I were going to buy one to see if anyone has major problems. I was bitten about 5 years ago with one where the touchpad was too sensitive, no matter what I did.
linux hardware support is pretty good these days and will work on most machines that don't have particularly esoteric hardware configurations.
But if you want to save yourself potential trouble, it's a good idea to research beforehand to make sure there's no obvious compatibility issues.
Also, these days various vendors sell machines with linux pre-installed so that's an option.
Best general advice I can give is to stay far, far away from anything with switchable graphics, and if possible anything that requires proprietary drivers.
> Also, these days various vendors sell machines with linux pre-installed so that's an option.
I have one of those machines. It's from Dell. Hooking up an external monitor doesn't just work. The scaling across the Ubuntu UI is all messed up.