Is there anything wrong with taking my ssd with mint out of my desktop and slapping it in an old laptop? I actually tried it and it seems to have booted up perfectly. How does it know what drivers to use automatically? Its pretty sweet that it works this easily.
Most distros use a generic kernel that contains drivers neeeded for basic operation. These kernels are larger than ones specially made for your hardware. Some specialized drivers like graphics may not be included but will run in a more simplified graphics mode that works for all cards.
Linux doesn’t have a Device Manager or database like Windows does. It automatically picks the appropriate drivers for the hardware in the system when it boots, based on what drivers are installed. And as others have mentioned, most distros ship generic kernels with all the open-source drivers included.
Thats so nice.
Only thing that didnt work was the wifi card but that’ll be an easy fix
Yeah, it confused me at first, but now I love it and never want to have to go back to dealing with Device Manager freaking out if I need to move a drive or swap out hardware.
It usually works fine. If later you find something isn’t working, you can just install what you need. I’ve done this several times and had it just work, even on machines with very different hardware.
When you boot the computer, each device identifies itself to the OS using a combination of a vendor code and a device code. In Terminal, try the following two commands:
lspci lsusb