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
There is a website to check which hardware is supported (on which distro). You can look up your laptop there, but beware that it is crowdsourced, so there might have been tinkering involved before submitting the results or the results may be outdated.
Click on “probe your computer” then check the results to see what your current setup supports.
Of course Linux has something helpful like this! I freakin’ adore Linux!
That is pretty sweet. I start up my docker service, run the docker command and ctrl-click the link it pops up in Konsole, and voila! I see exactly what I noticed in my system, mainly that the RGB bullshit doesn’t work which hurts my feelings not at all.
you could also just boot to a live distro and test your hardware. id recommend mint
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.
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.
I find quite often that the Live version of a distro will work perfectly, but after install some hardware won’t work anymore.
yes, that will happen.
the live distro’s come included with a lot of preloaded driver/firmware that is not included with a regular installation for a myriad of reasons; but you can use lspci and lsmod from the live environment to identify the proper software you need to add to your regular installation to get that hardware working.
It’s just weird that after install it can’t detect my hardware and pull the drivers it needs like windows does.
Sometimes it’s an ideological issue. Some distributions don’t ship nonfree drivers, some do, but require you to manually install them, and some have trouble making up their mind. This last is where you get live cds that automatically load the drivers needed for your hardware, but when you actually install, things aren’t working anymore.
