My laptop is an MSI Sword 15 A11UD. But I'm really looking for a program that analyses and projects problem areas and supported/unsupported hardware

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    edit-2
    3 months ago

    a quick and dirty way to find out if your hardware is supported is to try out a live usb distributions that runs entirely off of a usb stick and never makes any permanent changes to your system.

    it will run MUCH slower than a regular installation; but if you see all of your hardware and drivers enumerated in lspci; you'll know that it works out of the box.

    you should know that this limits you to the distros that have live usb images only; but if you go with mainstream debian, fedora, arch, etc. you'll instantly know that downstream distro's are capable of supporting with that hardware with that version of the mainstream distribution that they're forked from (eg ubuntu from debian; manjaro from arch; suse from redhat; etc.)

    i used this method extensively when i was new to linux and distro hopped a lot; it taught me a lot when i first started out.

  • _edge@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    Yes, it's called Linux. Just boot any live usb and you'll see.

    I get what you are asking: Why try hundred distros, just tell me the one that works, but I'm not aware of any such tool. If an open-source driver exists the kernel is really good at auto-detecting everything and make it work.

  • rotopenguin@infosec.pub
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    3 months ago

    If the distro just boots into a live session, you can get a pretty good idea there. They're all working off of roughly the same kernel and driver and firmware sets, give or take some distros being a year out of date. The slower distros have something like "backports" or "enablement kernels" to still give you the option of pulling in newer stuff.

    The graphics situation (compositor and mesa and kernel drivers and userland driver libraries) is more complicated. Especially with Nvidia. Your distro choice makes a much bigger impact there.

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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    edit-2
    3 months ago

    More consistent way would be to just check the Linux kernel version. Most distros are going to be running the default kernel with everything enabled, so you shouldn't need to worry about specific kernel options being disabled, unless you're using something really esoteric and not meant for general desktop usage. If you need 3rd party (nvidia) drivers, nouveau works out of the box, and should at least get you to the point you can install the proprietary driver, should you wish to taint your kernel in that way :'(