I am typing this post on a modern “Thinkpad” from 2020 where the hardware volume keys could never change the volume on Linux. But everything works more or less correctly in Windows 11, unfortunately.
What are my options for getting computer hardware, desktop or laptop (etc.), where the hardware is specifically supported under linux?
Let’s say I am wanting to plot a graph with “Usefulness” on the Y axis and “Cost” on the X axis. Then I could plot each computer on the graph, and make a decision about how much money to save up and spend for the best value that satisfied minimum requirements.
In my initial searching, I have uncovered these vendors as supporting Linux, albeit at a (usually) premium, niche price point:
- System76
- Framework
- Dell
- IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad
However I don’t yet have a good intuition for when this is true (for example my thinkpad having incompatible hardware) or where these belong on the hypothetical usefulness vs. cost plot.
Also, as I understand it, linux distros are not in the habit of “supporting” specific hardware as “works on our distro.” However in the past some have attempted to keep track of what works better than other things. I am hoping for a legitimate guarantee that the hardware I buy will not have hardware problems with the distro it supports. At least for some time.
My personal “minimum” requirements would be: feels “snappy” loading the OS and webpages/videos/media. The touchpad and keyboard are fully usable. All the hardware works correctly, and DPI/screen resolution doesn’t cause scaling issues (or said another way, fractional scaling doesn’t cause problems. Maybe this is unrealistic if I want to use arbitrary software like hexchat which is GTK2).
Let me know if I’m thinking about this in the right way or missing something.
EDIT: thank you everyone for your suggestions!
Sorry to not really answer your question, but I’m just curious what distros and kernel combinations you’ve tried on your 2020 thinkpad that don’t support the hardware keys? I never ran Linux on a thinkpad but I’ve heard that they are fairly well supported. Also, I wonder if it’s an issue with you desktop environment, which ones have you tried? I’ve seen most hardware features seem to work on KDE but many didn’t on xfce for example.As a bit of an anti-consumer, I would recommend trying a few totally different distros and DEs with the latest kernels just to be sure that it’s really not supported.
To answer your question a bit. I’ve honestly not had issues with drivers of any kind on any desktop hardware since I started using arch with KDE. I don’t even bother checking compatibility anymore. This is even true for Nvidia GPUs although there are some issue with Wayland there. For a laptop, I do watch videos of people opening them up to fix or upgrade them before I buy. If the laptop is hard to open or upgrade or if it breaks easily during the process because its only held together with plastic clips and glue then I don’t suggest you buy it unless portability is more important to you than device lifetime.
Hey thanks for asking! It looks like there may be a patch from this November that fixes it: https://www.spinics.net/lists/platform-driver-x86/msg48479.html
The problem was that the keys weren’t sending any input events, so there was nothing the distro or DE could do. But now that there has been a patch I may try it out. :)