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Comment by jckahn | Hacker News Reader

Would you be willing to share the details of your PC? I’d really like to build a custom Linux machine with the latest Intel CPUs, but I’ve never built a PC before and I don’t know which components are Linux-friendly.

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I did no specific compatibility research, because it’s more than likely going to work out of the box with distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, and you can do some work to get things going on distros with less hand holding.

It’s an i9-12900k on a Z690 motherboard (tons of these, I got a gigabyte model). I got a terabyte of nice NVME and 64GB of memory; made it out the door for about $1600 with a case, taxes, and everything. I didn’t buy a graphics card because I don’t need to drive anything other than some text editors and browser windows, and it’s really not a buyers market right now. I’ll probably pick up something in a year or so.

If you’ve never built a computer, highly recommend! It’s really not difficult, though can take time and it can be frustrating. Really rewarding when you boot it for the first time, though.

This is extremely helpful, thank you! This is pretty much the sort of config I'd want (fast CPU and lots of RAM). I'm glad to hear you've had a good experience with this so far! :)

Historically network and graphics drivers (and maybe sound?), and sleep mode were the things to check for Linux support. These days, all three major graphics manufacturers have Linux drivers, and I haven't heard any problems with networking for a long time. Sleep is probably still an issue... And most everything is already included for you (networking, sound, graphics) on the motherboard. So just check how good Linux support is for the motherboard you'd like to buy (and any PCI cards you'll add, if any).

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the advice!

Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but you should be fine with most parts for most Linux builds. The main thing I would say is if you go with a dedicated graphics card go with Nvidia as their driver support is much better (though I’ve used AMD cards with no issue on Linux also). Outside of that and maybe the rare motherboard feature that doesn’t work quite as you expect (and noting that pretty much all first party software monitoring/control tools are built for windows) you should find little issue with making a build suitable for Linux.

I have two PCs at home, one with an AMD card and one with an NVidia card. I'd characterize the NVidia card on Linux as "Windows-level hassle" (i.e. small, but present) while I think about the AMD card about as often as I'd worry about USB mouse compatibility (i.e. haven't given it a thought).

EDIT: small edge to AMD for graphics cards, but both are fine if using a distribution like Ubuntu

Yeah, like I said with my own anecdote I also didn't experience any issues w/ AMD graphics cards. Actually after searching a bit maybe I had that backwards and it was actually Nvidia that was the problematic one. I haven't had problems with either, but have read about problems and I thought it was AMD, but perhaps I was mistaken.

That's really good to know! I assumed that it was generally hit-or-miss. I'm relatively new to using Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) as a daily driver and would like to keep things as turn-key as possible. At least with laptops, you seem to only get that if you're selective with which configuration you purchase.

Laptops are definitely more hit or miss given the proprietary nature of each manufacturer layout. Because PC building is so common on desktops you don't have to worry about idiosyncrasies to nearly the same degree. If this is your first build you should just expect some things escape your purview and thus you may have to troubleshoot a thing or two, but there's nothing fundamental about Linux and desktop hardware the precludes a turn-key experience.

Awesome. I’m okay with a bit of tweaking to get things going, I just want to avoid a consistently poor user experience or instability. It sounds like a sensible custom Linux PC build should be (relatively) smooth!

I agree with several siblings that if you're building a desktop the only thing you really need to think about with compatibility is graphics card, because the driver situation is complicated.

For best compatibility (and lots of other reasons) I recommend Fedora - it usually has a much more up to date kernel than most other distros.

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