[compounding_it]

Ubuntu LTS is still the choice for many production environments and education and learning. As someone with Ubuntu from 2010 CDs, I find it refreshing that modern Ubuntu distros work OOB on most computers these days with excellent driver support.

[alprado50]

Is this even true? I mean, Windows is the main focus for all hardware vendors, and everybody who has owned a PC knows that malfunctions are unavoidable. If that is the case for Windows, then Linux cant be better.

[michaelt]

There's working, and there's working.

20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.

Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.

Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?

[hnarn]

> 20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era.

To be quite fair, this is pretty much the only reason Ubuntu exists. It started off as "Debian for people who just want stuff to work", but these days Debian even ships non-free wifi drivers on the install media. I've personally used both extensively and apart from the "enterprise support" argument and the minor convenience of having ZFS pre-compiled, I see no reason to use Ubuntu.

[ButlerianJihad]

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/linux-standard-base/

When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.

I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.

It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.

The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.

I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.

In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.

However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.

Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.

[Joel_Mckay]

Windows 11 set a low bar to clear... Most popular hardware will work on linux, but like always its better to check before your buy.

Distro like Ubuntu are a fair compromise to get amd/nvidia GPU drivers, wifi, and brother laser printer/scanner networking installed. =3

edit: seriously, why down vote the guys karma if its a honest question. Try to be kind people.

[dmos62]

Linux has been better for old hardware since early 00s. Just don't expect hw acceleration to work for older GPUs.

[abrookewood]

Windows is a dumpster fire at this point. Just unusable