Linux Hardware - Picks & Pans

Garuda Community
#1

Linux Hardware - Picks & Pans

Some distros restrict recommending hardware for several reasons. The first being that hardware support can change rapidly on a rolling distro and recommendations can then become outdated or erroneous. The next reason is much simpler, spammers often use this type of thread as an invitation to spam the forum with links to all manner of garbage.

Feel free to post your hardware picks and pans here, with one exception. Any posts containing links to products will be deleted. This is not an invitation to post spam links on the forum.

So, this can be the place to post your recommendations for hardware that works well with Garuda OOTB (or with minimal setup headaches). Conversely, you may also use this thread to point out hardware you are unhappy with, or has no driver (or other support) in Linux.

So, onto it. My Pans would be Nvidia and Gigabyte. The last several Nvidia graphics cards I purchased some time back now have no proper driver support as Nvidia has seen fit to deprecate their drivers. No more Nvidia cards for me as they are not a Linux friendly company.

Gigabyte likewise gets the thumbs down from me as I (and many others) had the misfortune of purchasing a motherboard that did not function properly on Linux. The USB and Ethernet both had serious problems on Linux. Other manufacturers using the same problematic components simply released bios upgrades to correct the issues in Linux. Not Gigabyte though, they refused to update the bios to support their Linux customer base. Thumbs down on Gigabyte, no more hardware from them either for me.

So, two Pans, now onto the picks. One problematic area has always been printer support in Linux. In this area I'd say the thumbs up has to go to HP printers. HP probably has the best Linux driver support of any manufacturer out there today. Many HP printers are simply plug and play (if you're lucky) with Garuda.

Feel free to post your picks and pans (but no links please).

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Laptops that are known to work with Garuda Linux
The BIG thread about laptops
#2

Hmmm - I guess by default ASUS motherboards work pretty well - and get BIOS updates pretty quickly when needed. At least when used with AMD stuff they do :grin:

Video - AMD again... the days of ATI being a bit difficult seem to have been overcome (and I never failed to get 'em going), and very well.

Printers: So far - Brother do pretty well - low price, hi performance - and they do Linux drivers for them all. Some of the older ones are 32 bit though - so they may become problematic some day - not yet.

Corsair - I can't say much about their support, but others have taken up the task for them :grin: ckb-next works well for keyboards other than the K95 - the mice are OK - the nvme drives are nice - the memory for use with AMD processors is easy to find and set..

I guess I'd be reaching for more to say - so I won't!

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#3

Laptop wise as long as you don't go with the super high end Lenovo been very solid the last few years.
and I expect them to also provide better support for the higher ones for linux considering their partnership with Fedora.

Printer wise I am prob the only one in the world that still really loves Epson since most of their printer models support everything Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, IOS and Android and they don't block 3rd party cartridges which are cheap.

so my pans would be Razer, every Razer device or peripheral I've owned seems to die within 2 years I hate gaming brands in general since longevity seems to be completely absent on these manufacturers

minor edit

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#4

Talking about laptops:
Personally Im using two Thinkpads (T430/T440p) which "just work" with Linux (and especially Garuda) from what I experienced so far. No NVIDIA graphics, just plain Intel HD.
If you are searching for a cheap and robust device to work with these are definitly worth a shot. :slight_smile:

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#5

i have pc with co incidently same configs as @librewish

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#6

I have a 10 year old Toshiba L350 i5 Intel base laptop with a SSD which really smokes along with no issues running anything.
Love my old my Epson printer, they are a perfect match.

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#7

Here you should post your laptop(s) with Garuda, preferrably with neofetch, tell about some small issues & how to fix them to help other users with the same configuration. Also, you can visit this Arch wiki page and post some information here, too.

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#8

I'm still awaiting the day when AMD produces a half decent encoder :sob:. For me, by far and away the biggest Pro of Nvidia GPU is nvenc. No matter how many cons Nvidia has, as long as I can get the hardware to work, I would take it over AMD GPU. Even it is a real pain in terms of Linux support.

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#9

Nvidia issues it's reason why i recommend use nvidia-tkg drivers. Nvidia issues it's reason why i recommend use nvidia-tkg drivers.
I have dell inspiron 7567 and Garuda linux works perfectly :slightly_smiling_face:

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#10

If you like burning your money and endless driver issues buy Nvidia. However, you better sell it on eBay and buy a new one every year or 2 max. Otherwise Nvidia depreciates your driver and the card is worthless to you.

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#11

I have the same Laptop and now i'm backuping my system to install Garuda. Thank you for sharing this information.

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#12

Welcome to the forums.

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#13

weirdly enough for me I'm having a mixed experience with both

stock nvidia drivers are giving me the best performance in games but cweird issues show up every now and then, tkg makes the system much more stable, less crashes and random issues, but performance in games is almost halved depending on what I'm playing

same laptop, btw