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If you're in the market for a Linux computer, this is a great resource for making sure your hardware is compatible.
If you're already running Linux, this is a super easy way to contribute info about the hardware you have to help others [1]. For many distros it's already in the repos. For example Fedora:
sudo dnf install -y hw-probe
sudo -E hw-probe -all
sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload
[2]: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=howto See section "Privacy"
They do hash MAC addresses, but they upload your entire Dmesg log, list of network interfaces (including virtual; VPN, bridge, Docker, etc), list of kernel modules with their configuration, list of partitions with their filesystem and size, list of all systemd units (services, sockets, and timers), list of all packages installed (from APT, I use Ubuntu).
Maybe run this from a Live CD rather than your system.
Also note that hashing MAC addresses prevents someone from getting your MAC address by looking at your report, but does not prevent anyone from finding your report if they know your MAC addresses.
> Also note that hashing MAC addresses prevents someone from getting your MAC address by looking at your report, but does not prevent anyone from finding your report if they know your MAC addresses
This is not true because it's hashed on the server side by secret salt.
TIL dnf has replaced yum, which replaced urpmi, which wrapped rpm.
I swear, every time I use a RPM based distro, there is a new package manager.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-3...
> While during these crazy times it feels like Fedora transitioned from Yum to DNF yesterday, it's already been a half-decade since the DNF package manager has been the default on Fedora. Next year with Fedora 38 they are looking at further evolving package management by way of MicroDNF.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/MajorUpgradeOfMicrodn...
To be fair, dnf replaced yum for quite some time now. However yum is still recognized as a command (but symlinks to dnf).
DNF is itself being replaced: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/MajorUpgradeOfMicrodn...
That probably explains why I didn't know about dnf; I only rarely use CentOS, so if using "yum" worked for basic things, then I wouldn't even have known it was calling dnf.
urpmi was never developed nor adopted by Redhat/Fedora/etc.
urpmi was developed by Mandrake/Mandriva in a time where rpm had nothing similar to apt-get.
Also DNF replaced yum 7 years ago. This is hardly news.
Thanks for the advice, just uploaded stats on my Ubuntu 20.04 machine.
I clicked around a bit, but can't understand how would this inform my decision of purchasing a part that's compatible with Linux.
Say I search for a laptop graphics card model and find that 4000 people are using it in their builds. That only tells me that it's minimally functional, not that it actually works at full features.
For example, it could be the that the video drivers for that card don't support[ 3d acceleration for Linux and people are just fine without it because they don't play games anyway. This info is missing.
Basically, I'd think a qualitative approach would be more useful than quantitative approach. I want to know that the thing I buy is going to work properly, not that I was suckered into buying something along with 1000 other people.
To give a real example this time, the Wi-Fi card I bought works fine under Windows, but the Broadcom drivers available in the Ubuntu distro didn't work properly at the time, so I had to go the old route of finding drivers that worked and then recompile the kernel modules on every kernel update. It got rather annoying fast. Linux Hardware Database would mark me as a user of this card (which would be correct), but it falsely implies that it's worth buying, which I think it isn't.
Good point, when planning to run linux on a laptop better get a one with an amd gpu and intel wifi (or ethernet)
Although that combination seems strange, because seems like an intel wifi chip would be present only on an intel cpu motherboard, and intel cpus are usually paired with nvidia gpu
Is there a wifi chip with good drivers for amd laptops?
Yes, an Intel WiFi card. A lot of laptops have the WiFi card installed as an M.2 card or mini-PCIe and is replaceable. You can get an Intel AX210 for less than $30 for example. Realtek also has some cards with drivers in the kernel.
Didn't know they are easy to swap, thanks for the info
I see some little (i) on "works" on some of mine from my report, so perhaps it's more for negative reporting about things that don't work well? Who knows; you never find out about all the issues with any hardware until after you buy it.
I have seen those (i) too on WiFi cards. After checking it, I think it means that such WiFi cards only work with some distros. For example [1], it does not work with Ubuntu 20.04 but it does work with Ubuntu 21.04.
Distros losing support for hardware makes me sad.
If you're a nutjob like me who runs Linux-libre instead of the normal Linux kernel, you'll be interested in checking the h-node database. https://www.h-node.org/
Russian is the second most popular language and the majority of top cities are in Russia. I wonder whether it reflects the real situation or the site is somewhat biased towards Russia for some reason.
The same situation for any other snap app in the store, e.g. https://snapcraft.io/vlc (see map at the bottom of the page).
As far as I know, Linux is massively used at the state level in Russia, for example, in schools and universities.
Well either Linux is incredibly popular in Russia or ROSA desktop a Russian distro is almost certainly over represented at 8.6% share. It might do to check if anyone installs hw-probe by default or promotes it to its user base.
Sounds like ROSA probably includes it by default; maybe with a "send your hardware stats in" button.
I think I've seen something like that with Ubuntu but I assume it would go to Canonical only.
There used to be a site at https://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/ which simply took the output from “lspci -n” and gave you a list of what the names of kernel modules were to load to support that hardware, together, IIRC, with what version of Linux was required. The site was full of user-contributed data from all sorts of devices which you could browse. Sadly, the page no longer exists.
It's amazing. Level of gratefulness up to the stars.
Would not the "Find computer" tables benefit from a column "OS/Kernel" near the "Probes", especially when the probe is just one? If you want to check how an OS or a kernel fares with a model, you would not want to open them all.
You can also find the Framework laptop in the database on Ubuntu 21.10 [1]. Only one component failed the test (Goodix USB2.0 MISC). The rest of the components are marked as "Works" or "Detected". I am not sure if "Detected" is a good sign.
'Detected' means 'Device is detected, driver is found, but not tested', see https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe#operability
I see OpenWRT not listed as an available distro.
That’s going to quite significantly limit the amount of available HW, no?
Is that intentional? If so, why?
data collection yes, but there's also a need to crowdfund hardware support
this affects oss wifi router OSes, linux on laptops + chromebooks, cell phones, gadgetbridge for fitness trackers, probably many iot devices
in the chromebook linux space gallium seems to have lost momentum (the most recent device with full support is from 2018, or 2017 from a well known manufacturer). if you want to run linux on a pixelbook there are stale forks of stale repos, but like 'alsa doesn't work yet' and support doesn't get merged to the kernel
committers are always complaining 'we don't have test hardware for this device' (and also they're uncompensated)
we should as a community find a way to fund this work. can be hardware donations, paying competent volunteers, and eventually working with hardware vendors directly to answer questions / do signed firmware builds if necessary
Great tool - it even shaved 4 years of my thinkpad :)
https://i.imgur.com/HdRVr5i.png
The selection bias here must be pretty intense, if they are showing Apple with a 10% share of the install base and the MacBook Core 2 Duo from 2006 as the most common model.
If you look at the bottom graph on this page https://linux-hardware.org/?view=cpu_family interestingly Core 2 Duo doubled in data representation solely this year.
I know it's unmaintained now, but SimpleOSX VM defaulted to a Core 2 Duo.
Looks like it's successor also defaults to a Core 2 Duo, though with 2 cores and SMT.
https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
That being said, just browsing through that site, it doesn't immediately seem like it's this family of Hackingtosh VMs adding significantly to the list or at all.
VEs are not presented in the database due to hardware identification problem and because people are not so interested in looking for virtual hardware.
If you click on 'Intel Core 2 Duo' then you can find unusual increase in installs of Debian 11 on old macs and macbooks this month. I guess it's temporary.
Wacky. It's great that Linux extends the useful life of such machines, though.
Too bad I just gutted mine...
Why would you test all Ubuntu desktop environments separate? Shouldn’t the hardware support be the same?
Shouldn’t the hardware support be the same in a given kernel version?
I've had instability issues with specific GNOME or KDE releases in combination with certain drivers (notably, you guessed it, written by NVIDIA) so at least Ubuntu vs Kubuntu matters. My laptop's touchpad only supports proper gestures with Wayland, which means disabling the NVIDIA drivers (or waiting for the next holy grail of GPU drivers, the current ones aren't the promised holy grail yet on laptops) is required for me to get the touchpad working. Because I value the ability to attach an external screen, I've instead switched back to X11, which means no gestures and therefore only partial touchpad functionality.
I don't know how much the other versions of Ubuntu differ, they all seem relatively minimal in comparison.
While kernel support is the first step, userland applications need to take advantage of the hardware for it to be useful.
e.g desktop envoronments need to care for how it interacts with touchpads, you want your wireless interface to actually be configurable. You want sane handling of which audio device is the default, and you'd want recognicable names to select them. The list goes on for another mile.