My laptop is an MSI Sword 15 A11UD. But I’m really looking for a program that analyses and projects problem areas and supported/unsupported hardware
There is a website to check which hardware is supported (on which distro). You can look up your laptop there, but beware that it is crowdsourced, so there might have been tinkering involved before submitting the results or the results may be outdated.
Click on “probe your computer” then check the results to see what your current setup supports.
Of course Linux has something helpful like this! I freakin’ adore Linux!
That is pretty sweet. I start up my docker service, run the docker command and ctrl-click the link it pops up in Konsole, and voila! I see exactly what I noticed in my system, mainly that the RGB bullshit doesn’t work which hurts my feelings not at all.
This is also super useful for people deciding what to buy, when the vendor would obviously not be keen to let you plug a USB into their device and boot into the scary Linux
a quick and dirty way to find out if your hardware is supported is to try out a live usb distributions that runs entirely off of a usb stick and never makes any permanent changes to your system.
it will run MUCH slower than a regular installation; but if you see all of your hardware and drivers enumerated in lspci; you’ll know that it works out of the box.
you should know that this limits you to the distros that have live usb images only; but if you go with mainstream debian, fedora, arch, etc. you’ll instantly know that downstream distro’s are capable of supporting with that hardware with that version of the mainstream distribution that they’re forked from (eg ubuntu from debian; manjaro from arch; suse from redhat; etc.)
i used this method extensively when i was new to linux and distro hopped a lot; it taught me a lot when i first started out.
Linux has live ISOs. Flash one on a USB stick, boot off of it and mess around. Generally, these days, everything except the fingerprint sensor/facial recognition thing and sometimes wifi adapter will work out of the box.
Yes, such a program is called an installer. /s
Sorry, I don’t have an answer for you that’s more helpful than the rest of the comments here, they all did well. I second booting a live system.
