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
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