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Comment by GiuseppaAcciaio | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I installed Debian on my old Toshiba laptop in 2004 (all 16x CDs of it, which a friend had to download for me coz I had no broadband), I couldn't update it because the ethernet network adapter (no wifi) on my laptop was not supported... nice to see that this curse still occasionally persists! If I remember correctly I fixed it by installing a different distro (Ubuntu or Kubuntu, which surprisingly despite being based on Debian had no issues recognizing my network adapter)

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> nice to see that this curse still occasionally persists /s

FTFY

Seriously, though, that's a huge outlier. I haven't touched a machine in the last 10 years where Ethernet and Wifi were not supported out-of-the-box. (Including my new Thinkpad, which I was weary about since it came with an Atheros Wifi module, but it too worked out-of-the-box without any tinkering).

These days, the biggest issues are with Nvidia GPUs from what I've heard.

The drivers for gpus are a bit annoying but only if you want to game on Ubuntu.

Nouveau drivers are horrible for performance and the nvidia ones are not always great, if you can find a compatible one.

That being said - I can't compare with AMD as my last system of Linux with an AMD gpu for gaming was back when it was an ATI gpu. :p

I have two systems with AMD GPUs: a desktop with a 2015 R9 Nano and a 2018 Thinkpad with a Ryzen APU. The amdgpu driver works perfectly on both of them. The Ryzen APU has one issue where you need to set `iommu=soft` in the kernel parameters to get it to boot, but that seems to be more related to the CPU than the GPU.

I don't have that parameter set, everything works fine. Ryzen 2400G.

Maybe it's got to do with the chipset? Not sure, I don't have any other Ryzens to compare against. But `iommu=soft` is strictly required on my system, otherwise the screen just stays black after the boot manager.

nVidia's drivers cover a pretty wide swath of cards. I've had decent luck in Ubuntu just going to the proprietary drivers section and clicking on the binary blob. The only downside is that it locks you into one version of the driver until you do a full OS upgrade, and that driver gets pretty out of date by the time the next LTS is ready.

It still does occur though. A while ago I bought an Asus mini-pc to be used as a media server, only to be stumped by issues with the Realtek drivers. Apparently they're no longer available after kernel version 4.15.

From what you're saying, I guess those devices just aren't that common anymore?

I had issue with intel gigabit Ethernet on an Asus z270e when I first bought it. Ethernet wouldn’t work on Linux or when I booted a Hackintosh just because.

Looking at the Asus spreadsheet for Linux my board supports Fedora and Ubuntu. OpenSuse and RedHat were listed as N/A.

TP-Link still have these issues and they're one of the largest manufacturers of wireless tech. In some sense a similar case to the Nvidia Issues.

I seriously doubt you can find a machine today where Ubuntu does run but you can't use the Ethernet, even WiFi issues are getting rarer.

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