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by Marsymars 975 days ago
> On anything that is a couple of years old Linux runs out of the box

YMMV. Just yesterday, I discovered that the Debian installer doesn't include support for UFS drives, which have been available in laptops for 3+ years now.

(Explaining to my wife why I was returning the laptop I'd just bought wouldn't have been a great endorsement for "Linux runs out of the box".)

Coincidental bug report from mail list last week: https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o...
1 comments
jacquesm 975 days ago
Interesting, UFS probably means something different to me than it means to you, for me it spells Unix File System, the bug report lists it as some hardware variation that I'd never even heard of today.

Did you see the follow up comments by the way? Compared to trying to get support from a commercial vendor the FOSS world never ceases to amaze me with the degree of effort people are willing to make to get other people on the way again.

So, let's strike 'a couple of years old' and add 'anything mainstream that is a couple of years old'. We're going to end up with a very long definition if we have to add all of the possible exceptions but I suspect there are more devices capable of running Linux by now than there are of running Windows!

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Marsymars 975 days ago
Well UFS isn't entirely esoteric, it's the successor to eMMC and the storage medium on most Android phones. (iPhones use NVMe) I think it's mostly that the UFS/Debian intersection is a bit of an edge case where users aren't typically trying to install Debian on low-end laptops, but it threw me for a bit of a loop when I ran the installer and it showed no available drives to install to. (The Ubuntu installer, for instance, does seem to include UFS support.)

And yes, the support was good! I expect the installer will be fixed within a few months, or whenever the next Debian release happens, given how easy the fix looks to be.

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