Comment by trelane
2 years ago
> Those random linux annoyances you need the terminal for?
Generally, if you want hardware that you don't have to fight, the only option is to buy computers with Linux preinstalled, with support. Modern computers are sufficiently complicated that they really only can support one OS. And, for consumer hardware, they even half-ass that.
That's not accurate. Most hardware works out of the box with zero config on all the major distros. There are always some machines with unsupported hardware of course, but it's more the exception than the rule nowadays. This is especially true if your hardware is at least a year old.
I would say that "Generally", it's not a thing you need to worry about. If something isn't working, it's probably a configuration issue on your side. The easiest way to avoid that is to pick an immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue, Suse MicroOS, and soon Ubuntu Core Desktop. Combine that with Flatpaks, and you pretty much never have to touch a terminal or worry about a broken system.
It was that Fedora didn't have some video codec that reddit used.
I googled it, it was like copypasting 2 or 3 commands, then I could watch reddit videos.
I can't remember the other bug, it might have been an ID10T error.
Can't even blame Linux for that, I have to install way more stuff to make Windows work out of the box. Fedora weirdly has lots of stuff already installed.
You can try to find the computer you want to buy over here [1], and see if there is any hardware incompatibility issues.
Generally, at this point, most hardware lines are supported. If there are problems, they are with new state of the art GPUs, some weird new modems or fingerprint readers. Generally, your mom won't be requiring those. If you are buying for yourself, just pre-check if there are linux drivers for each of these.
[1] https://linux-hardware.org/?view=computers