As another person had suggested, test with a live image first before installing it to an SSD/HDD, however Linux is very well maintained by the community and even if there aren’t native drivers from your hardwares manufacturer, for example Corsair Keyboard Drivers, there usually is Open Sourced alternatives for these things like CKB-Next.
I say this to everyone, once you get a grasp on BASH (Bourne Again Shell) and package managers & repositories (edit: and the filesystem structure) you’ll essentially be able to use any Linux distro, it just comes down to the nitty gritty of things.
I’d say that downloading drivers from the manufacturer is the absolute outlier and things working better with integrated open source drivers out of the box is the norm.
Is there a program or way to check what parts are covered by Linux? I have an old laptop I want to try Linux on beforehand.
As another person had suggested, test with a live image first before installing it to an SSD/HDD, however Linux is very well maintained by the community and even if there aren’t native drivers from your hardwares manufacturer, for example Corsair Keyboard Drivers, there usually is Open Sourced alternatives for these things like CKB-Next.
I say this to everyone, once you get a grasp on BASH (Bourne Again Shell) and package managers & repositories (edit: and the filesystem structure) you’ll essentially be able to use any Linux distro, it just comes down to the nitty gritty of things.
I’d say that downloading drivers from the manufacturer is the absolute outlier and things working better with integrated open source drivers out of the box is the norm.
Try before you
buydownload proprietary cruft.Btw you can check your laptop model in https://linux-hardware.org/
For some hardware you might have to install drivers or firmware yourself. Not all are included in all Linux distributions for complex reason.