Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
Mouse? Sure. Those are standardized and interchangeable. 99.999% chance of success.
Graphics card? Wi-Fi interface? Now you’ve got problems.
My experience is still a good success rate there. Back in ~2015 my family got an USB WiFi card which needed an out-of-tree module, which the manufacturer had on Github, complete with DKMS instructions. It was upstreamed after about a year, though!
The only completely unsupported device I’ve had is my laptop’s fingerprint sensor.
You won’t be having such a good experience with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom and NVIDIA have nothing but contempt for the Linux community.
Graphics card is generally ok if it’s AMD, and Nvidia is also ok with a bit of extra with. Intel I’ve never used anything that wasn’t built in.
For wifi, Intel or Atheros cards are high chances of just working. Some other stuff can be hit or miss but I’ve found most recent USB adaptors are ok.
Even then 99% of the time it’s just installing a single package to fix it. Just gotta check the lookup table on the wiki
I’m afraid that’s not true. Attempting to use an NVIDIA GPU will cause problems. You can kinda-sorta mitigate some of them, kinda-sorta, but not really, and the web is filled with people complaining about said problems.
Man I must be lucky or something, not 1 problem with my NVIDIA GPU. Tho more likely I picked the distros that had better NVIDIA support.
Must be. Once I started having problems with NVIDIA on Linux, I swore off all NVIDIA products and never looked back. Zero tolerance for that nonsense.
I think it’s gotten better in recent years. Years ago when I was trying to switch to Linux I had an NVIDIA 750 GTX Ti, back when it was the first Ti card and required the absolute latest drivers. Ubuntu’s repos didn’t package those drivers and Nouveau didn’t support it, so I had no choice but to install NVIDIA’s drivers manually. Then every time the kernel updated the drivers were effectively uninstalled and my system was unusable until I reinstalled the drivers manually. That experience led me to switch to AMD for the next card I bought.
About a year ago though I switched back to NVIDIA for the AI capabilities and I’ve had an absolute flawless experience with it, despite using (or because of?) Arch.