linux drivers

[StalePie42]

I am thinking of switching to linux but i am worried about things like motherboard drivers audio drivers etc. should i actually be worries or is it fine?

Thanks in advance

[Radium_Angel]

Depending on the distro, most of that stuff is built right in. The only thing you'd really have to worry about, is choosing the right GPU drivers.

What GPU do you have?

[Levent]

Only drivers that are painful to install for beginners are Wireless NIC drivers. If you use wireless networking and have anything but Intel, you wont have a nice time with it.

[Radium_Angel]

Also, you can use a LiveUSB test of the distro of your choice, and see what works and what doesn't, before installing to your system.

[RONOTHAN##]

The cool thing about Linux is that almost every driver is included in the kernel. The only things driver related you need to worry about are Nvidia drivers and some WiFi drivers since they're the only things where open source drivers don't exist/are complete crap. 

 

If you're motherboard has some weird edge case features, there might be some issues, but that's very rare.

[JimOkurku]

Don't be worried about drivers, most distros that aren't too basic like arch would have the drivers pre-built, like ubuntu, popOS or other beginner distro's have the drivers built in

[StalePie42]

22 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Depending on the distro, most of that stuff is built right in. The only thing you'd really have to worry about, is choosing the right GPU drivers.

What GPU do you have?

I am planning on using pop OS i have a wireless keyboard an mouse combo and am using a gtx 460

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, StalePie42 said:

I am planning on using pop OS i have a wireless keyboard an mouse combo and am using a gtx 460

As others have said, the wireless keyboard/mouse will be fine, the only trip up is the open source nVidia drivers suck for gaming, and a lot of distros (I can't speak for pop_os) use them as default and you have to manually change them out.

 

However..if you are happy with the performance out of the box, leave things alone and be happy.

 

[TheProf]

On 1/19/2022 at 12:44 PM, Radium_Angel said:

Also, you can use a LiveUSB test of the distro of your choice, and see what works and what doesn't, before installing to your system.

Exactly this ^^^

 

If you're not sure that your hardware would be supported, one way of validating this is to boot into a live environment and see if things are working as expected.

[dlg195]

The only drivers I have had issues with is ralink wifi cards and sound blaster cards. Nvidia drivers are so widely needed that user repositories make it pretty easy now like rpm fusion and AUR. But be aware that older cards like Kepler are on the 470 driver and if you're not careful you will download the latest and have issues.

[wasab]

most of these drivers are out of the box in the kernel. 

[AkIonSight]

A gtx 460, being an older GPU should be supported rather nicely by linux

 

especially by stuff like noveau, so imo, you should have no problems

[fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead]

Also Pop OS has a image with proprietary nvidia drivers

[johnspack]

Signed up just to reply to this.  A long time linux user,  but I prefer Ubuntu distros.  There is a checkbox to install Additional 3rd Party Drivers.

If you check that,  you will have Nvidia and Amd graphics drivers installed by default.  You will have wireless network drivers installed by default.

I also like Arch distros,  but you usually have to tell them to install graphics drivers.  I typically use Kubuntu as I prefer it's windows like interface.

I started with windows 3.0,  so I'm kind of stuck on having a proper start menu.....