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determining why/how hardware is supported in one distro but not another?
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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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I don't think you're going to find an explicit list of drivers in a distro, at least that I've found. I think a better approach will be to lookup your hardware and try to find what kernel version support was added. If the distro is shipping that version or newer, you'll probably be good to go.
There's exceptions however like proprietary drivers. While those drivers are becoming exceedingly rare, some distros will only ship with FOSS software, don't expect debian to ever work out of the box with nvidia. This is usually a principles/morals decision by the maintainers. That said distros that ship closed source software usually advertise it, they might offer an Nvidia build or the distro include software like steam pre-installed.
You didn't mentioned your component specifically but if your hardware doesn't have mainline kernel support, is pretty good assumption it's proprietary and will need to be handled separately with something like dkms. Check the distros documentation for their recommended approach.
Edit: to clarify on my debian example, Nvidia cards will work with open source nouveau out of the box on debian, but you will definitely want to install proprietary driver if you're using the card for CUDA or gaming.
how to do this?
good news is I don't think I have ever in my life owned anything nvidia.
thanks, I never heard of
dkmsbefore. I read the arch wiki, wikipedia, and made an attempt at the github repo (very long and over my head). The arch wiki only mentions nvidia. Is this something I need if I am certain nvidia is not the problem? Or is it a general thing?Off the top of my head some components I've had problems with: touchpads, touch screens, wifi, ethernet, bluetooth, audio in, audio out, media keys. I have suspected others also like (onboard intel) GPUs but it's a little harder for me to even pin those problems down to the hardware.
There's no centralized database I'm aware of, it's just googling hardware + "linux kernel" and hoping to come across something in a mail list. Admittedly, not ideal or always fruitful.
It's a general thing, it was created to load kernel modules (drivers) without having to recompile the kernel entirely. Again without specifics of distro and hardware it's hard to generalize an answer. With arch there's probably a package in the AUR that could be used. (And the package will setup dkms for you). Doing it manually is a bit more involved but shouldn't be much harder than cloning the repository and running a command inside the folder.
So basically everything... Lol. Still hard to diagnose without specifics, vendor support varies wildly. A newer Intel wifi card is likely mainlined, while a realtek card is going to be living in hell. Ethernet is a weird one, I don't think I've come across any vendors entirely not working but perhaps something like a Killer NIC (built with a proprietary protocol) could fail.
Many of these examples sound like a laptop, the arch wiki may have more information they cover a lot of popular models and note hardware capabilities. Usually if putting Linux on a laptop it's about buying one with that intention in mind because it can be very uncertain. Laptop vendors do crazy things.. use non compliant bios, proprietary media keys and finger readers, custom audio stacks to make them sound better, the list goes on.
I've had the issue on laptops and desktops but I have more experience with laptops. Also you are correct that arch-based tend to work pretty well. But I don't want to run arch on some devices because I do not plan update them regularly enough. I want a longer-term support distro. So in many cases I want to see what arch is doing that another isn't.
Only noting to be fair: in some cases arch-type does worse. I have an old HP desktop which is the case that arch couldn't see the ethernet connection. I could only use a USB-to-ethernet converter as PC doesn't even have wifi. But then I installed Debian and the ethernet works fine through the card. I do not need to solve this specifically as I plan to keep debian. Just one of the many mysteries.
I could find a specific issue that I do want to solve but it's such an ongoing thing I am hoping to learn the general principals rather than being spoon fed the answer. I'll only be back next week with another one.
That is a long list. I would have expected no problems with Ethernet cards, and not so much with WiFi but that is just a thought. Is this is pretty new computer ? Can you share which Linux distributions you tried ?
Linux distros I have tried include: ubuntus, debians, fedoras, opensuse, manjaro, endeavour, mint. No slackware, redhat, centos, gentoo, nix, kali, steam.
Every device I currently own is a refurb originally manufactured 5-15 years ago. It's based on some combination of cheapness and hoping that things will be supported by them time I get my hands on them. I don't have any requirement for blazing hardware.
Some of them are unsurprisingly annoying, like netbooks I picked up only because they were cheap and were reported to have linux successfully installed by people online. With these things, it seems that most of the features work just not all at the same time. I can choose between a smoothly-functioning trackpad in one distribution and bluetooth in another. But why? How do I compare them.
Good. Some light weight suggestions for your devices to try :
Netbooks as in for example Asus EEE models ? I think some of these models had really slow hard disks and also needed some tweaks for some part of the hardware. The difference in your hardware success / failure is perhaps mainly because of the different kernels and the hardware support of a Linux distribution release (btw, Debian 12 aka Bookworm had for the first time non-free firmware bundled with the installer). In general I think refurbished old Thinkpads should be fine with Linux. Here's two dedicated wikis for that :
Are you running Wayland on your Arch setup? There could be an extra layer of compatibility issue there as opposed to X11.
No to wayland.
I have used arch-based distros. They tend towards better support but not universally.
I think you may be mistaking what I meant? Wayland is a display server protocol, like Xorg, which is independent of the Arch base system. Depending on your hardware, kernel level support may be available and installed, while your display server software may be the component having problems and not the kernel or other system configurations. Just an idea to poke at, some setups and hardware support can break at different points based on the way you've set up your system with associated packages/dependencies.