Yes lol, a lot of hardware is simply incompatible with Linux. I had a wifi adapter that didn't work due to there being no Linux driver for it, so I just tried a different one and that worked. I recently compared 6 different headsets side by side before settling on a winner because Linux is so unpredictable when it comes to audio.
But like m0r1arty said, if you're trying to troubleshoot something specific then there are distro specific forums (not just reddit).
I haven't had any issues with installing distros yet so I can't comment on that, although I did have issues trying to install wine.
I don't blame people for giving up on Linux, because I have experienced that frustration of searching online only to see people act as if Linux doesn't really have any issues and that it must be your fault if you have problems. I happen to be motivated to make it my main OS though, so I was prepared to invest hours of time troubleshooting and configuring things.
I have had a problem with a wireless adapter too. USB. Actually most of the things I've had trouble with are USB or very old and niche (like a weird scanner).
There's not some crazy lottery, and every time I hear that term it's in regard to overclocking anyway. If overclocking is your obsession you're likely going to need a lot of your own research.
I'd pay particular attention to:
Motherboard (especially any onboard features like wireless, bluetooth, SATA, etc.). There's not that many motherboards it should be fairly easy to find out about.
Any expansion cards you plan to use beyond an AMD or Nvidia GPU
Anything USB beyond a keyboard and mouse
You really don't have to concern yourself with things like CPU and RAM unless you're just being especially weird with your choices and not sticking to a common recent-gen x86 CPU, etc. I've heard AMD GPUs have better driver support, but I'm sure there's resources for learning with all the Nvidiaphiles out there. I've only used with AMD GPUs.
If you have a bunch of gamer things, like Razer 1337 Gam3r D3a1hma1ch Super Professional MLG Extra-Mechanical Ultra RGB Sk1llz keyboard and the functionality of the included software is important to you, I'd be very wary of any such features working in Linux. Linux users are not the target marketing for those, so it's going to be nowhere near out of the box to use.
Also, probably worth trying to avoid built-in Realtek for any subcomponents you really intend to utilize. Their driver support can be pretty godawful with Windows, I'm sure it's only going to be even worse on Linux.
Also, AMD GPU's have some reputation for being a little more Linux-friendly due to open-source driver support. Not sure if that's changed much in recent years though so be sure to double check on how accurate that is. (I can't do it right now, since I have to head out.)
Anything USB you can just pass through to a virtual machine running windows. Like if you need some old scanner to work.
Not ideal, but not that annoying. Shouldn't stop you from using Linux.
But in any case I'd try out Linux in a VM under windows for a while so you start with a distro you can tolerate. Most linux distros now have terrible GUIs that look nice and have near-zero usability.
Desktop-use wise I'm already 98% Linux myself, the other 2% if my scanner works in a virtual box then that's 1% of it covered.
I'll get to gaming eventually. I'm currently not prepared hardware wise to dual boot, I just don't have the disk space to give up to partition at the moment
You just build a computer out of any computer parts manufactured since George W. Bush was president and install it dude. I don't understand why you've been having these endless problems for months. If it turns out your wireless adapter doesn't work you can go through the extreme ordeal of typing "wireless adapter linux" in on any website that sells electronics and buy whichever one is the top result for about $20.
It's not even 1% as big of a deal as you keep building it up to be. You can get a $100 used laptop off Amazon and do all the experiments you want on it if for some reason you can't just use your current desktop.
There are vendors who will specifically pick parts that will work with Linux but I suspect they also charge a premium for that certainty.
My laptop currently works fully with Arch Linux but it didn't always. At first I had to use the beta NVidia drivers to play games and it took many months to get the sound working because the essential information needed to see the sound chip in the laptop was coded in the Windows driver and not the ACPI.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted as it's a fine question to ask but I'd suggest a bigger pool of people to get answers from. Like one of the subreddits devoted to your favourite distro.
Wouldn't downvote it but he's not exactly using hardware lottery correctly as I understand it. He seems to be talking about just general hardware compatibility problems with Linux.
Hardware lottery as I know it is for intra product variability. Buying the same product from the same manufacturer guarantees the same rated minimum performance, but in reality no two pieces of silicone are exactly identical and each individual card/chip has it's own potential overclocking limit. You have no control over what you get, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope you win the hardware lottery and get a chip that can overclock especially high.
Yes there is. I've tried 3 times before finally sticking with it. For instance, I remember trying out ZorinOS a long time ago, and it simply refused to install because I was using latest AMD Zen CPU.
As a general advice, I'd recommend avoiding nVidia GPU as much as possible and sticking with AMD, and avoid wireless hardware.
I think Intel wifi cards at least work. They all are gonna require bullshit microcode, I think. If it's a desktop, I can imagine why you'd use wireless, but whatever you're thinking is probably a bad idea. Ok so I give you that. On laptops, they come with wifi so you want it to work, but a lot of them come with Intel which has worked for me with Linux easily.
There kinda is. I've mentioned this before but I've had issues with my AMD card, I even bought a new one, was probably the Motherboard+CPU that caused issues alongside the card. I never fixed it and jumped to Nvidia which has its own tiny bit of problems but is overall a lot better running for me at least.
My guess would be it's the expansion cards like wireless adapters that give the most trouble. I have been daily driving on linux for a few years now and every once in a while you do hit something that does suck, but for both my builds i've not had issues with mainline AMD processors / standard (but not expensive) MOBOs.
I also exclusively use Garuda as my distro because it comes close to what I'd want as a gaming desktop out of the box, and has the ability to quickly configure wine/ winetricks for the few things that aren't just 'enable on steam with proton', but I have had to reinstall sometimes to get things working properly.
Yes lol, a lot of hardware is simply incompatible with Linux. I had a wifi adapter that didn't work due to there being no Linux driver for it, so I just tried a different one and that worked. I recently compared 6 different headsets side by side before settling on a winner because Linux is so unpredictable when it comes to audio.
But like m0r1arty said, if you're trying to troubleshoot something specific then there are distro specific forums (not just reddit).
I haven't had any issues with installing distros yet so I can't comment on that, although I did have issues trying to install wine.
I don't blame people for giving up on Linux, because I have experienced that frustration of searching online only to see people act as if Linux doesn't really have any issues and that it must be your fault if you have problems. I happen to be motivated to make it my main OS though, so I was prepared to invest hours of time troubleshooting and configuring things.
I have had a problem with a wireless adapter too. USB. Actually most of the things I've had trouble with are USB or very old and niche (like a weird scanner).
There's not some crazy lottery, and every time I hear that term it's in regard to overclocking anyway. If overclocking is your obsession you're likely going to need a lot of your own research.
I'd pay particular attention to:
You really don't have to concern yourself with things like CPU and RAM unless you're just being especially weird with your choices and not sticking to a common recent-gen x86 CPU, etc. I've heard AMD GPUs have better driver support, but I'm sure there's resources for learning with all the Nvidiaphiles out there. I've only used with AMD GPUs.
If you have a bunch of gamer things, like Razer 1337 Gam3r D3a1hma1ch Super Professional MLG Extra-Mechanical Ultra RGB Sk1llz keyboard and the functionality of the included software is important to you, I'd be very wary of any such features working in Linux. Linux users are not the target marketing for those, so it's going to be nowhere near out of the box to use.
First result on a search engine peek:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/11ehfdn/how_to_know_which_motherboards_will_work_well/
Also, probably worth trying to avoid built-in Realtek for any subcomponents you really intend to utilize. Their driver support can be pretty godawful with Windows, I'm sure it's only going to be even worse on Linux.
Also, AMD GPU's have some reputation for being a little more Linux-friendly due to open-source driver support. Not sure if that's changed much in recent years though so be sure to double check on how accurate that is. (I can't do it right now, since I have to head out.)
Anything USB you can just pass through to a virtual machine running windows. Like if you need some old scanner to work.
Not ideal, but not that annoying. Shouldn't stop you from using Linux.
But in any case I'd try out Linux in a VM under windows for a while so you start with a distro you can tolerate. Most linux distros now have terrible GUIs that look nice and have near-zero usability.
I didn't know that...thanks. I do want to keep being able to use this old scanner so I'll have to get that set up
You can use VirtualBox to try out Linux and then later to run your scanner in Windows.
Desktop-use wise I'm already 98% Linux myself, the other 2% if my scanner works in a virtual box then that's 1% of it covered.
I'll get to gaming eventually. I'm currently not prepared hardware wise to dual boot, I just don't have the disk space to give up to partition at the moment
You just build a computer out of any computer parts manufactured since George W. Bush was president and install it dude. I don't understand why you've been having these endless problems for months. If it turns out your wireless adapter doesn't work you can go through the extreme ordeal of typing "wireless adapter linux" in on any website that sells electronics and buy whichever one is the top result for about $20.
It's not even 1% as big of a deal as you keep building it up to be. You can get a $100 used laptop off Amazon and do all the experiments you want on it if for some reason you can't just use your current desktop.
There are vendors who will specifically pick parts that will work with Linux but I suspect they also charge a premium for that certainty.
My laptop currently works fully with Arch Linux but it didn't always. At first I had to use the beta NVidia drivers to play games and it took many months to get the sound working because the essential information needed to see the sound chip in the laptop was coded in the Windows driver and not the ACPI.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted as it's a fine question to ask but I'd suggest a bigger pool of people to get answers from. Like one of the subreddits devoted to your favourite distro.
Wouldn't downvote it but he's not exactly using hardware lottery correctly as I understand it. He seems to be talking about just general hardware compatibility problems with Linux.
Hardware lottery as I know it is for intra product variability. Buying the same product from the same manufacturer guarantees the same rated minimum performance, but in reality no two pieces of silicone are exactly identical and each individual card/chip has it's own potential overclocking limit. You have no control over what you get, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope you win the hardware lottery and get a chip that can overclock especially high.
Yes there is. I've tried 3 times before finally sticking with it. For instance, I remember trying out ZorinOS a long time ago, and it simply refused to install because I was using latest AMD Zen CPU.
As a general advice, I'd recommend avoiding nVidia GPU as much as possible and sticking with AMD, and avoid wireless hardware.
I think Intel wifi cards at least work. They all are gonna require bullshit microcode, I think. If it's a desktop, I can imagine why you'd use wireless, but whatever you're thinking is probably a bad idea. Ok so I give you that. On laptops, they come with wifi so you want it to work, but a lot of them come with Intel which has worked for me with Linux easily.
There kinda is. I've mentioned this before but I've had issues with my AMD card, I even bought a new one, was probably the Motherboard+CPU that caused issues alongside the card. I never fixed it and jumped to Nvidia which has its own tiny bit of problems but is overall a lot better running for me at least.
My rule is always "if its cheap, common, and a couple years old, it will work with Linux out of the box."
It's very, very rarely wrong.
My guess would be it's the expansion cards like wireless adapters that give the most trouble. I have been daily driving on linux for a few years now and every once in a while you do hit something that does suck, but for both my builds i've not had issues with mainline AMD processors / standard (but not expensive) MOBOs.
I also exclusively use Garuda as my distro because it comes close to what I'd want as a gaming desktop out of the box, and has the ability to quickly configure wine/ winetricks for the few things that aren't just 'enable on steam with proton', but I have had to reinstall sometimes to get things working properly.
Hope it helps.