Guys I truly don’t mean to spam the community but these are legit questions. Yesterday I posted about linux compatibility and computers and every single person gave me knowledge to use and you’re all awesome.

Now my question is, I will undoubtedly be purchasing an older machine, would an older but good running machine still be able to install the latest kernels or versions of distros or are you limited to older versions only, based on the era of your laptop or is it really about the hardware you have? I know ram, disk space, basic stuff like that matters with distros, but I know that will not be a problem. I guess I’m thinking beyond that like processors. are older processors or anything else hold certain machines from being compatible with the newest and greatest kernels? Thanks!

  • Square Singer@feddit.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    Old laptops can often be a pain if they don’t have mainstream hardware.

    I have a laptop with a touchpad made by Elan. I couldn’t even find a website for them, but the laptop’s support page has a Windows driver that works well.

    I put Linux on there maybe 5 years ago, and there just is no driver for this touchpad on Linux, so it works in PS2 mouse modus and nothing else. No multitouch, no gestures, no way to change any slightly more advanced settings like sensitivity.

    • probablyaCat@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Ha I had this issue once upon a time too! And the one above with the wifi driver b43-fwcutter. Apparently not great laptop choices. The touchpad situation was awful, because the sensitivity was always insane. IIRC I had a way to slow it down, but then it was so so slow that I had to go over it like 30 times to get across the diagonal. Good times.

      • Square Singer@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        I vividly remember that time when I tried to get Linux running on my old laptop in the mid-2000s. There was no wifi driver for that card in the repo, but the manufacturer provided a driver to download. But it was in C++ source code that failed to compile because it was so outdated.

        So there I was as a teenager who barely knew a little C at that time, porting the driver from outdated C++ to the then-modern version. It wasn’t easy but I managed to.

        I am so happy it’s not 2005 anymore, when it comes to Linux.