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
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Of course Linux has something helpful like this! I freakin’ adore Linux!
This is also super useful for people deciding what to buy, when the vendor would obviously not be keen to let you plug a USB into their device and boot into the scary 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.
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 it can’t detect my hardware and pull the drivers it needs like windows does.
Thank you, that’s useful info, I didn’t know about this. Could you be so kind to share some link, or say something more, about lspci and lsmod and how to proceed from them to identifying which drivers one should install? Cheers!
here’s an example using my wifi card on my laptop; here i use lscpi and i’ve copy/pasted the stanza that pertains to the wifi card:
me@laptop:~$ lspci -v [REMOVED] 00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi (rev 01) DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wi-Fi 6(802.11ax) AX201 160MHz 2x2 [Harrison Peak] Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 9 Memory at 601d18c000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi Kernel modules: iwlwifi [REMOVED]i can see that the driver name is iwlwifi and i can use that to look for related modules using lsmod:
me@laptop:~$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi iwlwifi 598016 1 iwlmvm cfg80211 1318912 3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211now i know all of the module names and i can either google them to learn how to install them or i can continue further with the package manager on the installation to further backwards engineer it. (googling is faster).
as i mentioned earlier there are caveats: downstream distros tend to use a slightly older version of their base distros so you also need to make sure that you’re using the same version of the driver and kernel and adjust accordingly if it doesn’t start working right away.
Also do “dmesg | grep -i firmware” to see what firmware loads the kernel squirted into the various device controllers.
Fantastic, this is extremely helpful, thank you! 🥇 I wanted to test a couple of distros for my Thinkpad, and I’ll make sure to check and save this kind of information from live USBs.
If the distro just boots into a live session, you can get a pretty good idea there. They’re all working off of roughly the same kernel and driver and firmware sets, give or take some distros being a year out of date. The slower distros have something like “backports” or “enablement kernels” to still give you the option of pulling in newer stuff.
The graphics situation (compositor and mesa and kernel drivers and userland driver libraries) is more complicated. Especially with Nvidia. Your distro choice makes a much bigger impact there.
Linux has live ISOs. Flash one on a USB stick, boot off of it and mess around. Generally, these days, everything except the fingerprint sensor/facial recognition thing and sometimes wifi adapter will work out of the box.
Yes, such a program is called an installer. /s
Sorry, I don’t have an answer for you that’s more helpful than the rest of the comments here, they all did well. I second booting a live system.
