linuxPIPEpower

But where do you start to look? Most distros have their config published in two places: /boot/config-, for any installed kernel, or /proc/config.gz (cat /proc/config.gz | gunzip to read), for your running kernel.

Thanks for understanding the question and providing a concrete answer of a place to look! I will do this. :)

license issues of propietary drivers,

kernel or modules being slightly older and the driver is only in the newest kernel / modules bundle that didn’t make it into all distros yet

how do I find out about both of these?

Linux distros I have tried include: ubuntus, debians, fedoras, opensuse, manjaro, endeavour, mint. No slackware, redhat, centos, gentoo, nix, kali, steam.

Every device I currently own is a refurb originally manufactured 5-15 years ago. It's based on some combination of cheapness and hoping that things will be supported by them time I get my hands on them. I don't have any requirement for blazing hardware.

Some of them are unsurprisingly annoying, like netbooks I picked up only because they were cheap and were reported to have linux successfully installed by people online. With these things, it seems that most of the features work just not all at the same time. I can choose between a smoothly-functioning trackpad in one distribution and bluetooth in another. But why? How do I compare them.

No to wayland.

I have used arch-based distros. They tend towards better support but not universally.

I've had the issue on laptops and desktops but I have more experience with laptops. Also you are correct that arch-based tend to work pretty well. But I don't want to run arch on some devices because I do not plan update them regularly enough. I want a longer-term support distro. So in many cases I want to see what arch is doing that another isn't.

Only noting to be fair: in some cases arch-type does worse. I have an old HP desktop which is the case that arch couldn't see the ethernet connection. I could only use a USB-to-ethernet converter as PC doesn't even have wifi. But then I installed Debian and the ethernet works fine through the card. I do not need to solve this specifically as I plan to keep debian. Just one of the many mysteries.

I could find a specific issue that I do want to solve but it's such an ongoing thing I am hoping to learn the general principals rather than being spoon fed the answer. I'll only be back next week with another one.

• distros can have different kernel parameters

• unloaded kernel modules

• different kernel parameters

• older kernel/packages

• missing packages

how do I find out about these?

Are they specific to my system? Some kind of decision the installer makes? So I would investigate locally on the device?

Or will it be a general distro thing? Am I looking on their website to find out?

try to find what kernel version support was added.

how to do this?

There’s exceptions however like proprietary drivers. While those drivers are becoming exceedingly rare, some distros will only ship with FOSS software,

don’t expect debian to ever work out of the box with nvidia

good news is I don't think I have ever in my life owned anything nvidia.

You didn’t mentioned your component specifically but if your hardware doesn’t have mainline kernel support, is pretty good assumption it’s proprietary and will need to be handled separately with something like dkms. Check the distros documentation for their recommended approach.

thanks, I never heard of dkms before. I read the arch wiki, wikipedia, and made an attempt at the github repo (very long and over my head). The arch wiki only mentions nvidia. Is this something I need if I am certain nvidia is not the problem? Or is it a general thing?

Off the top of my head some components I've had problems with: touchpads, touch screens, wifi, ethernet, bluetooth, audio in, audio out, media keys. I have suspected others also like (onboard intel) GPUs but it's a little harder for me to even pin those problems down to the hardware.

is there a way to find out for a given component? where to look?

filesystem, release notes, repositories? terminal tool will give me some clues?

I think maybe if there are license issues the distros have different policies? You might need to do some kind of extra step to include certain drivers.

That's what I'm thinking!

I am asking a really basic question here. How do I find out about the drivers in the distro?

Information overload, particularly as a beginner can be a very real problem as modern IDEs can be a little like drinking from a fire hose. They are by their nature information dense.

All of what you mention is possible. Which is why I'm wondering if I need android studio to learn? Or can I use something simpler for now? Tutorials I find seem to want you to use AS. Does it do anything special?

Sort of reminds me of 101 intro beginner linux tutorial that begins with instructing the user to open vi. Even though eventually it's good to know vi, nano is better to start with.

I don’t intend this to be rude, but do you perhaps have some kind of visual impairment? Could adjusting your display to use a higher UI scaling help? Maybe bump up the default font sizes? Have you tested to see if you have some kind of colorblindness?

I've done the ones where there is a circle of dots hat have a number in them and I can see all the numbers. Some of them are faint but I assume that's expected.

But OTOH in general I find a lot of modern dark color schemes difficult especially the "low contrast" ones difficult to use. My guess has been it's because I mostly have shitty old hardware and the schemes might be designed by people with fancy modern displays that fix it somehow. Or if you are using a tiling WM instead of stacking windows on top of one another, the fact that the titlebar of the active window melts into the content of the one behind it may be a non issue.