I'm wondering if the best approach to going full Linux would be to copy-paste somebodies' benchmark because surely if I get a brand new purpose built PC with all the right components? I bring this up because I remember how when I was messing around with Linux mint awhile back and I had very little time the damn wireless adaptor I had wouldn't even get detected.
The steam deck would potentially be the next best thing I suppose and have a different Linux distro installed on that. Going to have to have a think about it and I'm making this thread because I wonder if there have been people who have done proper experiments on this because I do think the hardware lottery is real with Linux.
Now the motherboard comment is really interesting because I wonder if that's what potentially borked my Linux installs if motherboards are the more common problem with Linux, I tried swapping USB brands to something more known rather than fake and Chinese, It didn't do anything. It stands to reason then I should probably go with some kind of pure AMD mid-tier machine and just check out the specs of people who run Linux with zero problems then that should mean I can run Linux with very little issues.
You see I made the mistake of looking at Linux like a normie and thinking at least one of the distros should run out of the box for me. Got to examine it more like an autist because even though I'm fairly capable at hardware it's not my thing I'm more about the software. I underestimated badly how bug ridden Linux could still be depending on what hardware you picked which explains why Windows runs fine for me for the most part but Linux doesn't. It's a shame that the Linux autists don't explain this to noobs because it's really helpful information to know and would probably save people a lot of frustration down the line if they simply built second PCs to run Linux rather than piss them off trying to get Linux to run on components that aren't supported.
I'm thinking back to my time with Krita initially, I had a very old Wacom tablet that simply didn't work with zero pen pressure which is very important for art. Ended up buying a new XP-Pen tablet instead that worked beautifully and I had zero problems using it in Blender as well. It's completely true that some hardware just doesn't seem to be supported in a lot of open source projects and that's something to bear in mind.
So maybe the path forward is check motherboard compatability for specific distros? Buy AMD CPU and Radeon graphics cards for maximum compatability with Linux. By the way, Signal is another form of open source software that has this problem, I had to explain to people that I know RL once that it was likely their specific phone simply wasn't supported which I think is something that devs should be far better about reporting on generally with their software.
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.)
Thanks, that's useful information