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Yeah... when you have a home-built PC with *nix unsupported hardware and invested lots of $$ you're still looking for a hard time. First, there's the hardware c

Yeah... when you have a home-built PC with *nix unsupported hardware and invested lots of $$ you're still looking for a hard time. First, there's the hardware cost. I'm not throwing my Surface out, and I'm not throwing out my perfectly working desktop components either. But that aside... Every time I read how the great unwashed should just contribute fixes already to benefit everyone, I despair. I write code. I build my own PCs and I have a rather good knowledge of how to debug, fix, optimise and otherwise maintain all my software and hardware. I happen to also LIKE my software and hardware. If I were to start digging through Github repositories and... whatever other unknown resources I don't know the search terms to even search for I'd probably shoot myself. The point isn't that Windows is good. The point is that *nix assumes everyone's a *nix rocket surgeon and has nothing else in the world to do than spend days getting the blasted thing to deliver an equivalent level of productivity I get from my Microsoft setup. As much as I acknowledge everyone's right to like what they like, and agree that *nix might offer one or two better things than Windoze there's just no way...

danhor 5y ago
For Linux there is supported hardware from Vendors like system76 or similar. You don't expect to run Windows on Chromebooks, Android Smartphones or M1 Macbooks without issues, because these vendors only optimize & test for linux. But since linux is such an open platform, you have a large grey area "vendor didn't test it, ymmv". It may work fine, but you never know if the vendor decided to e.g. ignore standards for reboots and only react to the exact things that Windows does (This also applies to macos running on other devices, but way worse). Most devices have an entry in e.g. the arch wiki describing if they work OOTB, with hacks or some parts just don't. There are devices where the vendor tries to support linux, e.g. Thinkpads, but if you're using Nvidia it's still a pile of hacks in the background. I haven't needed to contribute any code myself nor use non-upstream drivers, but the process to use non-upstream drivers is usually pretty streamlined in arch (packaged in the aur). And since we're in hacker news: Programming things close to the hardware can be a great learning experience, maybe not when done under pressure.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  That was why I bought an Asus 1215B Netbook with GNU/Linux support out of the box, an Ubuntu distrubution actually. First the wlan stopped working, because Canonical decided to replace the proprietary driver wih the open source one, however since it was still work in progress, dozen of us had to suck it up with LAN until the open source driver got feature parity. Then my GPGPU experience got degraded from OpenGL 4.1/hardware video decoding to OpenGL 3.3 with the replacement of the AMD driver (fxgr) with the open source radeon one. So in the end, it doesn't matter that much buying supposedly supported hardware.
formerly_proven 5y ago
What kind of hardware are we talking about here for a self-built PC which isn't supported by Linux?
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  ● Intel Core i9 with 64Gb RAM ● Samsung 500 GB 2.5" SSD ● 2 x Western Digital 4TB mirrored disks ● NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 ● Sharkoon 600 Watt power supply ● 2 x Samsung U28R55 28" 4k IPS panels ● Das Keyboard 4 Professional ● S.M.S.L M6 Hifi Audio USB DAC with headphone amplifier ● 2 x Behringer MS40 digital 40-watt stereo near-field monitors ● Sennheiser HD 650 Open back headphones ● ELP 1080P wide angle webcam ● MANLI omnidirectional condenser microphone
  - danhor 5y ago
    Everything apart from the DAC should work (that may also work, but I'm not sure). The most important factor however, the motherboard, is missing in your post. The GPU should work on distros like Ubuntu or Pop!Os per default, but due to Nvidia driver shenanigans you might have to do some manual config on e.g. debian.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Every time I read how the great unwashed should just contribute fixes already to benefit everyone, I despair. I write code. I build my own PCs and I have a rather good knowledge of how to debug, fix, optimise and otherwise maintain all my software and hardware. But i'm not saying that everyone should contribute, or even that everyone can. I know that i'm certainly not experienced enough in systems programming to do that, instead being more proficient with higher abstraction level languages. That said, the fact that there's the possibility of contributing for at least some people is better than what Windows and other OSes let you do. Not only that, but if the problem is annoying enough and makes enough people frustrated enough, it's likely that there's actually someone amongst all of them who cares enough to fix the problem for everyone. For the fix to land in the mainline might take a few months or years, but the end result is still better than looking at a black box and having literally no options to get it to do what you want. If a new Debian updates break my GRUB install, it's likely that there will be people on GitHub discussing workarounds and fixes within minutes. If my off brand hardware doesn't work as i'd like, it's likely that i'll have to do some digging but the chances of me finding a fix aren't 0 either. If the same happened with Windows drivers, i'm not entirely sure what i could even do, since the hardware setup is something that almost noone actually cares about. In the case of *nix, if i were skilled enough, i could probably dig around the source myself and work on fixing it, as someone luckily had.
vmladenov 5y ago
> If I were to start digging through Github repositories and... whatever other unknown resources I don't know the search terms to even search for The package managers and their associated websites tell you exactly where the sources are; you don’t need to search for them yourself. This is how I found some quotes for `fortune` from CentOS that I liked which weren’t present in the macOS version.

danhor 5y ago

For Linux there is supported hardware from Vendors like system76 or similar. You don't expect to run Windows on Chromebooks, Android Smartphones or M1 Macbooks without issues, because these vendors only optimize & test for linux. But since linux is such an open platform, you have a large grey area "vendor didn't test it, ymmv". It may work fine, but you never know if the vendor decided to e.g. ignore standards for reboots and only react to the exact things that Windows does (This also applies to macos running on other devices, but way worse). Most devices have an entry in e.g. the arch wiki describing if they work OOTB, with hacks or some parts just don't. There are devices where the vendor tries to support linux, e.g. Thinkpads, but if you're using Nvidia it's still a pile of hacks in the background. I haven't needed to contribute any code myself nor use non-upstream drivers, but the process to use non-upstream drivers is usually pretty streamlined in arch (packaged in the aur). And since we're in hacker news: Programming things close to the hardware can be a great learning experience, maybe not when done under pressure.

pjmlp 5y ago
That was why I bought an Asus 1215B Netbook with GNU/Linux support out of the box, an Ubuntu distrubution actually. First the wlan stopped working, because Canonical decided to replace the proprietary driver wih the open source one, however since it was still work in progress, dozen of us had to suck it up with LAN until the open source driver got feature parity. Then my GPGPU experience got degraded from OpenGL 4.1/hardware video decoding to OpenGL 3.3 with the replacement of the AMD driver (fxgr) with the open source radeon one. So in the end, it doesn't matter that much buying supposedly supported hardware.

formerly_proven 5y ago

What kind of hardware are we talking about here for a self-built PC which isn't supported by Linux?

FourthProtocol 5y ago
● Intel Core i9 with 64Gb RAM ● Samsung 500 GB 2.5" SSD ● 2 x Western Digital 4TB mirrored disks ● NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 ● Sharkoon 600 Watt power supply ● 2 x Samsung U28R55 28" 4k IPS panels ● Das Keyboard 4 Professional ● S.M.S.L M6 Hifi Audio USB DAC with headphone amplifier ● 2 x Behringer MS40 digital 40-watt stereo near-field monitors ● Sennheiser HD 650 Open back headphones ● ELP 1080P wide angle webcam ● MANLI omnidirectional condenser microphone
- danhor 5y ago
  Everything apart from the DAC should work (that may also work, but I'm not sure). The most important factor however, the motherboard, is missing in your post. The GPU should work on distros like Ubuntu or Pop!Os per default, but due to Nvidia driver shenanigans you might have to do some manual config on e.g. debian.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Every time I read how the great unwashed should just contribute fixes already to benefit everyone, I despair. I write code. I build my own PCs and I have a rather good knowledge of how to debug, fix, optimise and otherwise maintain all my software and hardware. But i'm not saying that everyone should contribute, or even that everyone can. I know that i'm certainly not experienced enough in systems programming to do that, instead being more proficient with higher abstraction level languages. That said, the fact that there's the possibility of contributing for at least some people is better than what Windows and other OSes let you do. Not only that, but if the problem is annoying enough and makes enough people frustrated enough, it's likely that there's actually someone amongst all of them who cares enough to fix the problem for everyone. For the fix to land in the mainline might take a few months or years, but the end result is still better than looking at a black box and having literally no options to get it to do what you want. If a new Debian updates break my GRUB install, it's likely that there will be people on GitHub discussing workarounds and fixes within minutes. If my off brand hardware doesn't work as i'd like, it's likely that i'll have to do some digging but the chances of me finding a fix aren't 0 either. If the same happened with Windows drivers, i'm not entirely sure what i could even do, since the hardware setup is something that almost noone actually cares about. In the case of *nix, if i were skilled enough, i could probably dig around the source myself and work on fixing it, as someone luckily had.

vmladenov 5y ago

> If I were to start digging through Github repositories and... whatever other unknown resources I don't know the search terms to even search for The package managers and their associated websites tell you exactly where the sources are; you don’t need to search for them yourself. This is how I found some quotes for `fortune` from CentOS that I liked which weren’t present in the macOS version.