AMD or Intel Graphics. Intel networking, Atheros, or a chipset that is known to be friendly with Linux.
CPU support is fairly diverse.
Sound is fairly well supported but with some devices can be a surprise, as are touchpads. Touchscreen and webcams are generally a bit more dubious.
With desktops, I very rarely have issues but it’s also easier to pick my own hardware. For laptops, I usually don’t buy something that’s new to market unless the component models are known to work. If it’s been around for a bit I can usually Google comments by somebody else who’s got one and tried to run Linux on it.
It was pretty much plug and play for me, I don’t really play much but it’s worked for any game I’ve thrown at it (although there was some artifacting in CS2). I’ve also done some AI stuff with it and haven’t had any issues.
You basically already know the drill; buy it from a Linux-first vendor that offers devices that you can afford. A list of vendors can be found here. Personally, I’m quite fond of NovaCustom and Star Labs. Fortunately, both have ‘cheaper’ offerings with their NJ50 Series and StarLite respectively.
Thanks! but when it comes to linux hardware vendors like those, for me at least, it’s hard to know which ones are good and which ones are bad or unknowns. also, i did look into the lower grade star labs and there was something about the processors they used… i did a little reading and they got poor marks for being uber slow or something. i could have misinterpreted things though.
but when it comes to linux hardware vendors like those, for me at least, it’s hard to know which ones are good and which ones are bad or unknowns.
You hit the nail on the head with that remark. Because, quite frankly, it’s hard for all of us; I would love to read reviews done by Notebookcheck (or similarly high-profile reviewers), unfortunately that’s simply not the case. In this case, you would have to scrape whatever knowledge you can find about these specific devices (and their vendors) before judging for yourself if it’s worth taking the risk.
The reason, why I’m personally fond of NovaCustom and Star Labs, is because they’re known to contribute back significantly to the open-source community; same applies to System76, Purism and Tuxedo. I didn’t name any these in my previous post, because none of them seemed to be sufficiently affordable.
i did look into the lower grade star labs and there was something about the processors they used… i did a little reading and they got poor marks for being uber slow or something. i could have misinterpreted things though.
If it’s about the processor being slow, then I’m not surprised. It’s from Intel’s N-series, which is somewhat of a spiritual successor to Intel’s Celeron and Pentium lines. Both of which are known to be not powerful. And for that price you shouldn’t expect a lot more, but I agree that an i3 (or something else with similar processing power) should have been possible at that price-range.
It’s been great. I can get updated stuff on top of stable point release distro without mixing repos. Offers nice features like sandbox and forcing everything under .var for easy transfer to another machine.
There’s some small issues. For some apps fonts look weird but it’s fixable. Firefox is so sandboxed that KeepAssXC and KDE Connect/plasme browser integration has harder time with it. Managed to fix XC. Sometimes there’s issues with permissions. Well most those things were issues with permissions as in with the sandbox. But I think those issues will be settled at some point.
I used it at work recently to update my work-provided HP Thunderbolt dock, and it resolved an issue where the external monitors would fail to activate after resuming from standby. I never got an update notification when I was using my Windows laptop so I was oblivious to it; it was only thanks to connecting it to my Linux laptop and fwupd, that I found out there was an update, which subsequently resolved the issue.
I love it when stuff like this happens and Linux saves the day. =) (and I get to show off to my Windows heathens colleagues.)
I never used a spin-off of a unique distribution of GNU/Linux on my own computer, except the dark Ubuntu times. It seemed right at the time.
Now, I don’t see why I should recommend a distro that tries to be easier on new users when the original has sane defaults and is closer to upstream regarding all the tools and software bundled with it.
Here are my recommendations for new users in that order (regardless of their computer knowledge): Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, LFS. Friends can help with the installation and should consider easy maintainability when dealing with users who just want to use it.
I haven’t used Mint in years, but back in the day downstream distros from Debian often worked better for desktop users than Debian itself.
This is because of Debian’s ‘stability’ philosophy. This meant that bugs could stick around for years in Debian stable after being fixed upstream.
Of course, with each new stable release, there should be fewer bugs so this problem should become less over time.
I’ve considered switching from Manjaro to Debian on my laptop, but then I think about how great the AUR is. That’s pretty much the main appeal for Manjaro over Debian, for me.
Before switching to LMDE, I did try just using Debian with Cinnamon, thinking it would be pretty much the same experience. I did not really enjoy the experience. There were too many niceties missing that I had taken for granted with Mint. I wasn’t interested in spending my time hunting down all the tweaks and packages to make those changes.
Brave is worse than Chrome. Affiliate link auto injection, unauthorised selling is copyrighted data, their own unblockable ad network, etc. Use Firefox.
Their business-practices sure do leave a lot to desire, which actually does hurt their trustworthiness; arguably their most valuable asset as a privacy-first browser. Hmm…, good food for thought, thank you!
Use Firefox.
I mostly do already 😅, from OP: “at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser”.
Thank you for mentioning that! I had dismissed it due to alleged shortcomings of its security features. While the allegations are (still) there, I’ve never heard any rebuttal or anything else of that matter. Would you happen to know anything in this regard?
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