Comment by dylan604

3 hours ago

> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.

That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon

The pain points have gotten less painful in the last few years. As someone who has run a hackintosh at one point, Linux is a walk in the park in comparison.

Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.

The review's purpose wouldn't be to provide you an in-depth guide to walk you through installing some distro. It's more like probing for high level details around hardware compatibility.

For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.