Your incompability issues with Linux.

[Jayce]

Just a general question. I've installed Ubuntu Linux on multiple desktops and I've never ran into a trouble when it came to hardware support. The only time I ever ran into an issue was when I tried to install Ubuntu on my laptop, which had trouble with the sound and wireless card.

I was just wondering, is it dumb luck, or does Linux pretty much support all desktop hardware that's on the market now?

[Saxon]

Well quite a bit of hardware is supported but it's far from total, wireless support is a little on the sparse side but it its getting better. Some sound drivers are a little on the rought side an so are the newest graphics cards but that is getting better to.

[horndude]

tv cards are hit and miss, so are many many printers, stick with postscript and your usually good to go

ati video cards don't usually work too well either, and nvidia broke opengl support with via chipsets like 2 years ago and never fixed it, goto 88.xx series era drivers or below to work that out, cant remember what series that was in linux but it was pre 1.0 beta something I think

[Jayce]

For the record I have an ATI graphics card in my laptop and Ubuntu ran flawlessly with the restricted driver. I even got compiz fusion up and running in less than 5 minutes.

[horndude]

some of the ati cards work fine, many don't

nvidia has been much better about providing kernel modules

x.org has already started phasing out some of the really old hardware, its part of the process of progress

linux has come a long way, these things take time, especially when its done for the sheer pleasure of it and not $$

[CalcProgrammer1]

Desktop hardware that doesn't work with Linux...hmm...

Well, ATi cards have downright awful support. Fglrx was a lame attempt at first, barely pushing decent FPS in games, and it didn't support AIGLX. Now, they've worked harder and implemented AIGLX and made it better, but it's still not in the Ubuntu repository and even after using the .bin file ATi provides, it doesn't work quite as well as the Windows Catalyst drivers.

nVidia works great, at least my old MX420 works fine even with Compiz Fusion.

However, desktop surround sound (Realtek integrated audio) doesn't work, though stereo does.

The biggest issue is desktop wireless cards. I don't own one myself, but I tried installing Ubuntu on my friend's computer (he saw my Compiz desktop and wanted it for his PC). The LiveCD wouldn't boot GNOME because it was stuck complaining that it couldn't find Broadcom firmware. For some reason, my laptop's wireless PCMCIA card is Broadcom and it works just fine with the Restricted Drivers Manager (I'm using the card right now in Ubuntu), but my friend's desktop PCI wireless card stopped Ubuntu from even starting up.

Actually, even my laptop is pretty well supported...The only thing that doesn't work is the Rage Mobility M3's integrated TV-in chip (Philips PhilDec Capture) [the Rage graphics chip works fine, the capture card doesn't]. Also, the ThinkPad buttons don't work right, but they used to. Ubuntu's new hotkey-setup package broke them when 7.10 came out.

Ubuntu also works fine with the integrated graphics chip in my desktop that I didn't even know existed until recently...I needed to take the motherboard out of my Pavilion, and on the back was this thing that said "Do Not Remove" screwed into the board...so I removed it, and behind it was a VGA port. I plugged my monitor into it without my AGP card in, and it worked fine (S3 Savage I think, didn't have very good 3d performance). Wonder why HP covered it up...even if the AGP card did disable it,...stupid PC manufacturers.

[void]

I've had no issues with Linux on desktop or laptop. It does depend on hardware manufacturers, Intel is an example of a well supported manufacturer, especially for wireless. Despite lots of hardware being detected and successfully used, drivers for Linux don't always support all the features for a device. For example, a printer may work, but some of the features for that printer may be missing under Linux, but available under Windows. This is mainly due to manufacturers having close-source drivers with no specifications, or only providing limit hardware specifications and no native driver for Linux. This obviously results in the implementation of limited driver. Also the latest and greatest hardware isn't always supported once its released, as time is needed to develop appropriate drivers. Having said all that, the people who develop drivers do an excellent job against such problems.

[CalcProgrammer1]

That's why nVidia works so much better than ATi...ATi doesn't provide specifications and they only make a horribly implemented lame I-don't-give-a-care-how-it-works driver and promise "future improvements" which aren't perfect yet, but getting better. nVidia provides fairly full-feature drivers for their cards, which is why my nVidia GeForce4 MX420 64MB performs better than my ATi Radeon X1600Pro 512MB in Compiz Fusion.

[Jayce]

My ATI works flawless. *shrug*

[CalcProgrammer1]

What chipset do you have? The X and HD series seem to cause the most problems, as the pre-X1k ones work with the "radeon" open source, more compatible drivers. I have had increasingly better luck with each new fglrx release, but none have truly shown me anything as good as or better than Catalyst in Windows.