Linux and compatibility

Macha

King
Joined
Dec 8, 2006
Messages
859
Location
Ireland
I've noticed a few threads were people complained about Linux hardware compatibility so I thought I'd write this.

I had a Linux boot on my computer and my laptop. I uninstalled it on my laptop as it only has a 60GB hard drive and I bought the sims 2 with a good few expansions, completly filling the remaining free space on my windows partition. My computer's hard drive failed on me last Thursday.

Every computer I have ever installed Linux (Dell Dimension 8300, Inspiron 8600, Precision M60 and some 2001 HP computer) on has just worked with no driver issues. I have 5 discs with drivers that need to be installed for Windows to use things like my printer, graphics card, speakers, network card etc. These all worked perfectly after Linux was installed (which only took 20 minutes average compared to XP's 1-2 hours).

The only thing I couldn't get to work was a Netgear WPN111, wireless network dongle that is hit and miss on Windows aswell.

What is everyone else's experiences with Linux and compatibilty. The distro I use is PCLinuxOS.
 
Linux is great if you have mainstream hardware. Not so great if you have new, high-end, or not so common hardware. The last time I seriously used Linux was in 2006. Even though the GF7800GTX I has then was nearly a year old, I couldn't find any drivers actually meant for it (older drivers for NV cards worked, to be sure, but I had to put up with odd things like my desktop resolution resetting on every reboot), or any drivers at all for my sound card (Creative X-Fi).
 
I've uses SuSe, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo and now Ubuntu on my computers.

In earlier years I regularly had some driver issues, but in recent years (the last 3 or so) I've never really had any device I couldn't get to work. The more time passes the less the belief that linux has bad compatibility is true.
 
I like windows and Ubuntu dual boot. But until recently, Ubuntu's (intel) SATA Raid compatibility was very poor.
 
I have never had PCLinuxOS fail to detect and configure my hardware. Admittedly, all my hardware is at least 6 months old.

Linux device drivers are getting better all the time. And hardware manufacturers are starting to make better Linux drivers for their devices. For instance, Intel, ATI, and nVidia are all trying to make drivers that will support their newest graphics chipsets in Linux.
 
Aye, device support is improving all the time. As always I suggest trying a live cd of your distro of choice to see if your devices work out of the box, and then check to see how difficult it is to get the ones that don't work, working.
 
I think hardware support is pretty good in linux these days. An out of the box windows install will have you hunting all over hell's half acre for drivers whereas most linux drivers are already in the kernel.
 
Come to think of it, that's right. Finding drivers for hardware in windows is sometimes time consuming. It's sometimes very hard if at all possible to find support for old hardware with new windows.

Maybe hardware support in Linux is now better than for Windows?
 
Linux has a knack for detecting compatible hardware.
 
Never had a problem with Linux drivers. I even got my crappy webcam to work

Linux device drivers are getting better all the time. And hardware manufacturers are starting to make better Linux drivers for their devices. For instance, Intel, ATI, and nVidia are all trying to make drivers that will support their newest graphics chipsets in Linux.
Yeah, I think Intel GMAs have open source drivers
 
Yeah, I think Intel GMAs have open source drivers

Yeah, Intel has open-sourced their drivers. ATI is opening their Linux drivers. nVidia is actually behind the curve on this, as their official, 'state-of-the-art' Linux drivers are still closed (IIRC).
 
When I first started using linux there was some issues with support, but as of the last year or so I've had no problems with my hardware. In the short time I've used linux it has made a massive amount of progress (much more than windows) and doesn't appear to be stopping.
 
Currently the nvidia modules are still of better quality than ati, but I expect this to change within a year. The open source crews are already working away at new ati drivers. A couple people on the compiz fusion team are as well. I expect some real interesting things to happen in the near future.
 
Currently the nvidia modules are still of better quality than ati, but I expect this to change within a year. The open source crews are already working away at new ati drivers. A couple people on the compiz fusion team are as well. I expect some real interesting things to happen in the near future.

Been using Ubuntu for over 2 years now and never had a single driver issue.A couple of friends installed it as well, same story. :D
 
I have a pretty poor battery in my pretty poor Acer laptop and suddenly, when using Windows, it would drain in 2 minutes and the keyboard would not work with the battery plugged in. It's my laptop for mainly typing, email and internet I decided not to buy a $150 battery but try Ubuntu instead. And it worked! Battery life is up to 40 minutes (when new, it was barely an hour already) and the tedious wireless works well too, after I downloaded a .deb package which fixed everything with one click! Great!

For giggles, I loaded the Ubuntu LiveCD on my main computer and it detected everything great (wireless, GeForce8400).

So apart from downloading one specific file, I have no compatibility problems whatsoever. Hardware-wise that is.
 
I like windows and Ubuntu dual boot. But until recently, Ubuntu's (intel) SATA Raid compatibility was very poor.
When I had Linux (RH 7 IIRC), it wouldn't recognise my RAID (AMD). It meant that I had to remove one of my hard drives and my DVD drive, opting for the main HDD and my (faster) CDRW drive.

This was back in 2002 or something, though...
 
RAID support has come a long way. Still, with some distributions you still need to jump through hoops and swim through mud to get there. Find the right distro and it will be a snap.
 
2002. People that was 6 years ago. That was when XP was brand new, I don't even think sp1 was out yet. And it didn't have out of box raid support either.
I was using Windows 98 at the time. Worked just fine.
 
Top Bottom