I never really see hardware lacking Linux support mentioned, which got me caught by surprise when a computer with a Broadcom network card couldn't use the card. What other hardware don't work with Linux?

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[–] 34 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Broadcom, as you've discovered. That's the one brand that I've always had trouble with; they go out of their way to be closed source: never publishing specs, never responding to developers. They're horrible to the point where I will not buy any product that uses Broadcom chips. Which used to be a PITA because they were also common.

Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.

One of my computers has a MediaTek wireless chip where WiFi isn't supported but Bluetooth does.

A lot of people have problems with NVidia cards; I've not had trouble with either AMD or Intel GPUs (although, I think all Intel GPUs are CPU integrated?).

Multifunction printers are still iffy, and even just plain printers can give grief; I've come to believe that this is simply because CUPS is ancient and due for a completely new, modern printing service. It's an awful piece of software to have to work with.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.

    Not sure if it technically counts as fingerprint readers but using my YubiKey Bio daily, for login on my desktop and WebAuthN and... 0 problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think that's because Yubikey handles the fingerprint reader part, not Linux, right? As far as Linux goes, it's a black box security fob - but I might be wrong about that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Indeed hence my warning. I'm only sharing this alternative because in practice it works and it's secure (AFAIK).

    Edit :

    black box security fob

    IMHO that's a feature, namely I do not want to OS to mess with this specific part of my setup. I do also have NitroKeys and FPGAs to tinker with but that's different. FWIW if there is an OSHW&FLOSS alternative to the YubiKey Bio please do share.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Intel Arc discrete GPUs released 2022

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I've run AMD, Intel, and Nvidia on linux and I would say my intel experience was by far the best. I use an a380 in my server for transcoding, and I had an a750 in my desktop but switched to a b580. AMD gets the graphics stuff right, but intel does the graphics and compute right on linux where AMD ROCM is a major pain in the ass. It may not be great if you do tons of gaming, but it works quite well for me.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hmm, I run an Arc GPU at work without any issues. Just using plain mesa on NixOS. The Intel devs were quite responsive when we ran into issues as well.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Arc support was added after release to Linux Kernel 6.2 and it's steadily improved since. Older Linux distros, or "LTS" oriented distros that favour stability may still not have support for them. I know Unraid was very slow to pick up on it and I had to settle for passing the pcie device through to a VM to get it working. Intel is keen to made these viable though, and I love having the AV1 encoder from my A380.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Ah I see, haven't been on "stable" distros for a long time so I wasn't affected. I've enjoyed the good support and the video stuff is definitely nice. On the AMD side, still no idea how to encode or decode anything on my Framework 16, meanwhile Intel is acing it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have been fine with both Canon and Lexmark and also a Brother unit that someone in my family owns that their new Win11 machine refused to talk to; I opened up my ASUS t-pad with Ubuntu and printed in five seconds.

    But yeah CUPS has actually caused many a headache to the point that I’ve disabled it on some units.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    CUPs is simply ancient. It's due for an overhaul; I keep expecting someone to come along and Poettering it, only I'd hope without also making it take over cron jobs and logging.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I’m not Linux-savvy enough to understand everything you said lol. But I’m glad at least that I don’t have to rely on CUPS I just have two printers with static IPs so it’s easy-breezy George and 'Weezy.

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