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[–] 129 points 3 months ago (56 children)

"Linux supported hardware" is an outdated phrase only used in windows propaganda today.

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  • [–] 62 points 3 months ago (38 children)

    Absolutely not.

    Signed, owner of half-supported hardware.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago (31 children)

    Out of curiosity what hardware are you using that's not supported?

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Certain fingerprint readers and touchscreens

    ex. Goodix

    It's not the fault of Linux, it's the hardware manufacturers. Still, you need to consider it before buying the device

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    HP Reverb G2 for me. Still waiting on Monado to get it fully working but no such luck yet. Hugely appreciative to the dev team for all of their amazing work, of course.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    Peripheral devices, mostly. I have some half-supported, like Logitech mouse (G-shift doesn't work), and for some I rely on open-source devs (like Corsair keyboard for certain keys/modes/connectivity fix). Sure, you can say just buy compatible devices, but it's not always viable to replace everything you owned before moving to Linux.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Broadcom hardware (WiFi cards an webcams in particular). Plus there are quirks with some proprietary driver version not building against some kernel version...

    With unsupported hardware and closed drivers you are always on the lookout for some breakage.

    And it's not a Linux problem nor a complaint on distro maintainers. It's manufacturers that are shit.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    What Linux kernel are you running which isn't supporting your hardware?

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    My case: I have an nvidia GTX 980. It's old but it's what I have.

    Nvidia dropped its support from driver version 595.

    Driver 580 is what I need, it worked until 7.0 but no longer in 7.1 (was using Fedora 44). Since my hardware is old I switched to Debian Trixie.

    Another example is the facetime HD Webcam of macbook pro: to make it work you have to install OSx or download a recovery image, compile a C program to extract a specific binary blob, then use that blob to recompile the driver on your kernel.

    There are lots of examples: it's a big world, with lots of hardware and mostly no producer interested in the Linux world.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    For desktop? Probably. For laptop, linux support can be awful, because manufacturers keep introducing hardware that don't support standard drivers. Webcam? How about an IPU6 that needs kernel modules just to be detected and then special calibration files just so the image is not a stripey corrupted mess... How about no on-board sound because screw you I guess. How about a non standard USB controller so that you cannot even communicate over your USB ethernet dongle when the wifi is once again some special sauce non standard shit...

    These are Dell and Lenovo Yoga machines at the University I work at. Some are absolute garbage where the USB is always powered and will drain the battery when the computer is turned off and no BIOS setting will disable this.

    We are now looking into Tuxedo and Framework...

    PS.: even windows has issues with these, where you have no touchpad and no USB anything (mouse, keyboard) until you somehow install a driver...

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  • [–] 25 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Psht. I wish! This is wrong and will set people up for failure. There is absolutely hardware that will work well with Linux and hardware that will not.

    I tend to run into problems with brand new laptops. Microphones don't work, web cams don't work, fingerprint readers don't work.

    I have a Dell Dell Pro next to me with a web cam that doesn't work. Arch, btw.

    I also have a Lenovo T14 where everything does work.

    The point is you have to RESEARCH before you buy. Otherwise, you're gonna get mad a Linux for not supporting your hardware, instead of being mad at yourself for not researching first.

    Hardware that's too old is problematic and hardware that's too new can be problematic.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    There's still tons of devices where Linux doesn't work properly with them.

    My Intel wireless cards cannot maintain a 6ghz wireless connection for shit despite some of them being over 5 years old. And Intel. Latest stuff, older kernels, none work well. Oddly whatever version of Fedora I had worked the best. My wifi wasn't unusable when 6ghz was an option. It only dropped to 5/2.4ghz once a minute instead of every 5-20 seconds.

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    [–] 40 points 3 months ago

    Different disks if you must at all.

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  • [–] 36 points 3 months ago* (7 children)

    2 separate bootloader partitions. Grub launches the windows bootloader on a different partition so it isn't aware of anything other than itself. Then the 2nd bootloader actually launches windows. Don't try to share one partition or else windows will inevitably wind up clobbering the Linux loader.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    This assumes windows is not maliciously checking for other bootloaders in order to fuck with them, which I'm not willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt on tbh.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It does work.

    If you have two EFI partitions, Windows will stop looking once it finds the first one.

    Which is actually a problem sometimes, as it will stop looking and use the first one it finds, even if it's on different drive than windows.

    Imagine installing windows on a machine with two drives. Drive A already has an OS and an EFI partition, so you install Windows to drive B.

    Except Windows will still go ahead and drop the bootloader onto drive A. Potentially breaking the OS that's there, plus setting up Windows in such a way that it requires drive A to boot. EVEN THOUGH THAT ISN'T WHERE YOU INSTALLED IT.

    This is why guides tell you to install windows with only one drive connected. It's the only way to ensure it puts the bootloader and OS on the same drive.

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    [–] 24 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    My gaming PC dual boots Debian and Ubuntu

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    Dual booting us viable, if you're curious its good to try linux via dual boot. Windows doesnt break the linux bootloader. The incident referencing was a bug I believe. I know plenty of people who've been dual booting for 2+ years keeping both OSs up to date with no issue.

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    [–] 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    My bootloader has survived just fine despite being dual boot for the past 2 years. It may have something to do with me only having booted windows once in all that time (to fix a borked NTFS drive) 😁

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago*

    That certainly helps.

    In my case the solution is two EFI partitions.

    Windows finds the first and doesn't bother looking for a second one, which happens to contain grub and my efistubs.

    Windows will go ahead and clear the UEFI menu sometimes, but manually booting an efi file and then re-adding the grub and stub boot entries is small compared to having my stuff actually deleted.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Only evil if you use one disk. :)

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'd had a dedicated windows drive for a little while... Maybe a bug and not malice, but the forced Windows 8 -> 10 upgrade deleted everything on my second drive that windows wasn't installed on

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    I had two disks and windows still fucked my secure boot keys somehow in a way that I wasn't able to fix so I had to reinstall the linux side. I turned secure boot off afterwards so should be fine now but it was a thing that happened.

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    [–] 11 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    i've quadbooted a lot before (linux/freebsd/osx/windows), it works pretty well these days with uefi. was pretty hard to handle with legacy bios though

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The reason I just overwrote the Windows partition, instead of futzing with fixing dual boot was GDID. MSFTs global ID that tracks, literally, everything you do.

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    [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    Put Windows in a virtual machine where it belongs!

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Windows does stupid things with boot because it's apparently alone in the world.

    Like this NTFS lock up thing because it's not really shutting down anymore but going into hibernate.

    I had to change that setting but other than that dual boot works. Just realized that's still win 10 on this machine. When that runs out time for fresh Linux only install.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    Microsoft’s boot killing shenanigans convinced me to just scrub the taint of 11 off this time.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    This might be the most dweeby thing I've seen. I love it :)

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