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by stevekemp·1y ago·view on hn ↗
I do remember there was some point in the mid/late 90s where I had to do a lot of research before buying [desktop] computers and hardware - would this specific network card be supported? Would this graphics card work with X11? etc. Maybe it was trauma and paranoia from the WinModems of the day, that were never going to work.

But by the early 2000s we seemed to switch to a world where I just assumed Linux would support my new hardware, be it a used Zip-drive, a web-cam, or whatever.

These days I'm the same. I fearlessly buy random motherboards, and hardware toys, and just assume they work. So far I've been lucky, but it is a real testament to the driver-developers. The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing.

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Even in the mid--late '00s I had to make careful purchases of things like wifi, or be stuck manually patching and compiling half-working drivers.
Bluetooth was another pain point.

But by and large, thing did still just work.

Around that same era Windows wasn’t exactly problem free with device drivers either. A fresh install on random hardware would often require hunting down Windows drivers online. Though of course those drivers did always existed because of Windows’ market share.

I spent many years using 10BaseT and then later wired ethernet, which meant I avoided WiFi for the longest time.

Now you reminded me that I bought a wifi dongle around 2012/2013 and ended up having to return it because I couldn't get it to work. But the very next one I bought as a replacement worked first time. So perhaps I'm having rose-tinted memories!

ndiswrapper anyone?
LinModem for me! I got my US Robotics 33.6 (with X2 software upgrade-ability) working and was so amazed. Then my dad's ISP got rid of a bunch of external serial 56k modems and I was in heaven. Those "just worked". Oddly, it was probably 6 months later that DSL started making a splash and I was trying to figure out ways to use my Alcatel USB "stingray" model with Linux. I ended up buying an external "gateway" that required me to set the MTU to 1492 instead of 1500. It screwed up my Redhat 7.2 downloads so badly. The checksum would never match so the install would always fail.

Somehow I still refer to these as "the good old days".

"The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing."

Very much so -- many drops form a torrent.

Oh that softmodem that only worked on windows.
Oh, the dreaded WinModems! And other Linux-incompatible hardware. To help with this research of which hardware would work there were several dedicates sites that attempted to collect info from Linux users on which drivers to use, etc. It's all so much easier now.
Just as long as you don't buy NVIDIA for your Linux desktop!
I've had multiple Nvidia cards across multiple installs of Linux, never had an issue once. Just install the Nvidia driver and it works. IMO the supposed problems of using Nvidia on Linux are wildly overblown.
I used NVIDIA on sway/hyprland on Wayland on NixOS with a variety of driver versions last year and still had awful flickering that made it basically unusable. After much consternation, I fixed it by buying an AMD card, and it's worked smoothly since.
The author of nouveau is working for NVIDIA now. And redhat is writing their nova driver to the mainstream. I really wish this would mean using NVIDIA is going to be a breeze in the near future.

Until that I'll buy AMD.