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posted by martyb on Monday April 28 2014, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-we-there-yet? dept.

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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday April 28 2014, @05:59PM

    by evilviper (1760) on Monday April 28 2014, @05:59PM (#37310) Homepage Journal

    Generally, you can count on Linux and BSD to at least minimally support almost any computer out there. Graphics might be slow and/or finicky, you might have bugs trying to attach USB3 devices, you might find some peripherals that aren't supported, and most of all, you might find that ACPI suspend/resume isn't reliable, but I'd expect absolutely everything to boot-up and run Linux/BSD these days.

    In general, I stick to the big-names in motherboards (MSI/Asus/Gigabyte/etc), for longer warranties and fully-compatible hardware more than anything, but it provides a nice, common, and reliable baseline for open source software support, too.

    No-name junk motherboards are still to be avoided for plain old hardware reasons... A few years back I acquired a PC Chips motherboard, it tested out okay, so I figured: Why not use it? After several days of head-scratching and frustration, I discovered that when one specific case screw was tightened and contacted the metal ring around the hole on mobo, the BIOS would hang indefinitely while trying to access the secondary IDE channel.

    Before that, I've faced a jillion cases where a no-name motherboard would simply refuse to boot-up with any (PCI) add-in video cards, despite my large selection, and even though the BIOS options were all there.

    These days, it's more a question of, will the sensor data be reported correctly... Will CnQ work properly with a years-newer untested CPU and peripheral combination? etc. There's so much smarts in a motherboard, that it's amazing you can buy a good one for $30 some times... and even more amazing that people never learn, and will still go with a complete flaming piece of junk to save $2.

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
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