For a given device, sometimes one linux distro perfectly supports a hardware component. Then if I switch distros, the same component no longer functions at all, or is very buggy.
How do I find out what the difference is?
For a given device, sometimes one linux distro perfectly supports a hardware component. Then if I switch distros, the same component no longer functions at all, or is very buggy.
How do I find out what the difference is?
I feel like 99% of the time it's just "does this distro have drivers for this hardware". If yes it works, if no it doesn't.
But on Linux aren't most drivers part of the kernel?
Depends on the hardware. You have to download NVIDIA drivers from your package manager.
I think maybe if there are license issues the distros have different policies? You might need to do some kind of extra step to include certain drivers.
That's what I'm thinking!
I am asking a really basic question here. How do I find out about the drivers in the distro?
I mean it depends on the hardware. (if we knew what hardware youre talking about it would make this much easier)
You can check to see what drivers were compiled as modules or into your kernel by reading the kernel configuration at
/proc/config.gzor/boot/*config*There might also be out-of-tree (not included with the kernel) drivers installed as packages on your system but this is very rare outside of like... having an NVIDIA card and running the closed-source vendor driver