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It's not hard to find desktops that work well with Linux. However it is much harder to know which laptops will work without fault on say a Debian or Red Hat system. I recently ran into an issue with Intel GMA hardware on a Dell D420, after being reassured by most forums that it had no hardware issues with the current kernel that Debian uses. (Kernel 2.6.30 however works great, btw)
What resource would you recommend to quickly, easily, and accurately know what hardware will work well with a particular distribution? Or is it always a hit or miss approach?
2Hardware support will always be a moving target. There is just too many different hardware configurations out there to test all of them. The same applies to commercial OSs as well, they just have more resources to commit to testing. The best idea I've heard is to automatically collect configuration info and error logs from a user's machine when errors occur. This is what commercial OS's have resorted to and it's worked pretty well. For end users the best we can do is try out Live CDs before committing to install an OS. Unfortunately, space limits how many drivers can be provided on a CD. – Kenneth Cochran – 2009-07-31T18:57:54.510
For commercial OS (read Windows) the HW maker also deliver drivers (the quality isn't always the best thought), that is not always (rarely) the case for linux (and others) – Joakim Elofsson – 2009-07-31T20:42:16.133