this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Yeah, never had a problem with incompatible hardware on Linux.
No siree, not a once!
Such an up and down though. I have an ancient epson scanner that cannot be used on modern windows, but I just installed the driver on linux and everything has been amazing.
Like pre-usb ancient or what?
Not quite that old, it is connectet via USB-B. Windows drivers only exist for 32 Bit systems, on linux the drrivers come in a deb package that works on modern installations.
You can install 32 bit drivers on Windows 11 though, it supports both.
He might have oversimplified to assume it was the 32-bitness that is the problem. Could be an ancient Windows Driver Model version that is no longer supported. Could have been that there were no signed drivers, or at least no drivers that are signed in a way that would pass today.
The thing is that Windows banks on extended binary driver compatibility for running "old" hardware, but breaks that compatibility ever so often, and they don't have first-party investment in drivers for hardware and third-parties would eschew standard multiple device drivers that would have worked fine in favor of their own branded driver/app experience. In Linux, mostly those devices get covered by generic multi-vendor drivers that are better maintained.
Makes even less sense. 20 year old usb Epson flatbed scanner here that plugs into any win10/11 system and works without any fiddling, and that's generally consistent with any usb hardware on Windows. I'm not saying linux isn't a good solution to get problematic old hardware working, but let's be real here.
Did you ever had to buy a new laptop because Linux stopped supporting the current one?
I've had the reverse. I started using arch because debian didn't have my wifi driver yet.
Yeah WiFi seems to always be the biggest pain in the ass, and it’s still way easier than it was 15 years ago.
Haven’t had a single laptop with an issue, personally (though I only have bought Lenovo laptops in the past 7 years or so, but in that time I’ve bought 3). I’ve got one (really cheap) WiFi dongle I’ve had on my HTPC that had been a pain. Had I taken the time to choose the other really cheap one that had a different chipset, it would’ve worked out of the box. Oh well.
No but I am looking for a new laptop and this time I'll definitely spent more time checking Linux compatibility.
My previous thinkpad worked fine out of the box, but my current laptop is an HP Omen, that I mostly selected for the price to performance ratio. But I immediately learned that Linux compatibility sucked. Like not being able to boot an Ubuntu usb drive (without messing with the boot parameters).
Yeah before getting my current laptop I looked into the Linux compatibility. I went Thinkpad though this time and it honestly works amazingly. I can't use all the features (fingerprint mostly) but thats moreso because my setup doesn't have any way to rather than support not existing. And biometric ID can be less than useless when used as the sole security measure, such as unlocking your phone with your fingerprint. If someone wants the data on that device bad enough, they now have a means to get it.
And in response to XKCD 538, good luck getting me to clearly say my complicated ass password correctly after being beaten lmao. If I could I probably would
I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.
So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.
No, since I mainly use Windows and replace my laptop at least once every 10 years.
TPM has existed in laptops since 2006
Not particularly relevant. The only TPM that counts is TPM2, which was 2014 for the specification. Not even all "TPM 2.0" implementations are considered sufficient. Plenty of devices even in 2019 were being built without a TPM2 that would qualify for Windows 11, in part because the industry didn't know that it was about to be required, in part among those that tried not knowing their chosen implementation would still not qualify.
This is not a problem with Linux, this is a problem with hardware manufacturers not making drivers for Linux.
Which is understandable, honestly. Making drivers is surely not an easy task. Targeting Windows covers the 80/20 rule.
I just broke out into a cold sweat remembering trying to get wifi to function on my netbook back in 2k8.
My friend, let me be that guy that says "that's nothing!". In 2002 (around kernel 2.14 I think it was) notebooks had no integrated wifi (at least not the second hand notebook I could afford, and it wasn't cheap anyway). I had to buy a cisco pmcia wifi card from across the world and recompile the kernel to include wifi support (and the driver of course). I don't remember why, but I remember that recompiling the kernel happened quite frequently. Maybe because I was distro hopping a lot or because there were quite (relatively speaking) kernel updates. Not good old days, but at least I learnt!
There was no DKMS back then (it appeared in 2003 and took a while longer to be adopted) so anything you wanted to add to the kernel and didn't have a ready-made binary module for your exact machine and distro had to come as a patch + recompile.
But you try to tell the young people today that... and they won't believe yah!
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Oh lord, the time I spent trying to get an Airport wifi card working on a dual-USB iBook in Slackware... shudder.
My SMC network cards from the mid 90s are not supported 😭
More likely you have issues with incompatible software.
Nah hardware drivers or support for certain hardware is still a thing. I mean compared to 5 years ago it isn't but compared to windows it still happens sometimes
Look I've been in the situation where I've had to compile a modern kernel for Ubuntu so that my devices work, my stupid fault for running Ubuntu though.
Someone gave me an 8 year old laptop to clear down. So I figured I'd swap in an SSD and put Linux on it.
Damn thing wouldn't even boot. Wasn't even that bad a spec machine. 6GB RAM should have been plenty. Shame really, was actually looking forward to seeing how far it had come in the last ten years or so.
Exactly. Should have run. Something in the hardware it didn't like. Just got a black screen with a flashing cursor. Never got past that point.
That sounds like a problem with the graphics drivers
Next step from there is to find out what graphics hardware it has and try to see if you can get a distro that's known working with it
Technically, the next step would be retrieving it from the landfill it got sent to.
Well then, guess that clears that up
Yeah, very odd. A few weeks ago, I retired a computer that had 4 GB of RAM that was doing server duties, running Debian. It was doing a great job until I tried running a virtual machine on it (for Home Assistant); that was just killing the poor thing. The processor was a Core 2 Quad that was introduced in 2008, so I got plenty of life out of that setup.
6gb ram is plenty, especially for a lightweight distro like antix or slax.
From AntiX:
Winmodems and other cheap junk comes to mind.
But, apart from stuff made just for windows, what've you got?
I haven't in a long while.