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.
Yes. In general - it’s called live cd. Some distros ship with that in their installed image. {K,X,}ubuntu come to mind. Mint might do as well. You can boot into it and look around, see if basic stuff - network, audio, etc - works.
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.
Btw you can check your laptop model in https://linux-hardware.org/
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.Yes. In general - it’s called live cd. Some distros ship with that in their installed image. {K,X,}ubuntu come to mind. Mint might do as well. You can boot into it and look around, see if basic stuff - network, audio, etc - works.
And you can do this with a USB, it doesn’t need to be a CD/DVD.