According to Phoronix, getting support from motherboard manufacturers can be downright hostile for linux users. Some go as far as requiring Microsoft Windows to be installed before getting to speaking terms. With TYAN as about the only motherboard maker (that I am aware of) to fully support linux, my question is: "Do any of you use a TYAN motherboard in a typical desktop use case? If so, what were your experiences, pro and con?
Followup question is: Have any motherboard manufactures changed their tune recently regarding support for linux users?
With the recent end-of-life of free Windows/XP support, Valve's work on its Steam OS, and Android's large market share, how close are we to the point where a user can just install linux (or a BSD variant) and it just works? What hardware (old and new) has been especially problematic for you? What has been your greatest challenge and/or frustration?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2014, @05:08PM
Tyan are pretty big players, though almost entirely on the server side. Good source for multiple CPU mainboards. I'm a long time "just go with Intel" guy, myself, but lately I've had trouble with their wifi bits. The iwlwifi kernel module may be fine if you just want client services, but if you want to host an AP... iwlwifi was pretty unusable for 802.11n under 3.6, and still brings down hostapd when traffic gets heavy. It horks something up enough that it's not sufficient just to reset the module and restart hostapd: really have to restart the whole system to get it back to stable.