The Quest Of Finding Linux Compatible Hardware

While Intel is often looked at as being the most Linux and open-source friendly company among the major IHVs, as shown today in Intel's Linux Sandy Bridge Graphics Still Troubling, even in 2011 there are still serious Linux hardware issues to overcome. The Linux hardware support has a much better foundation than where it was at in 2004 when I founded Phoronix, and for hardware that's been in the marketplace for a few months old these problems quickly go away, but for new adopters it's the biggest challenge.

So just how hard/easy is it to find say a graphics card that has been tested to work on Ubuntu 10.10, with the stock 2.6.35 kernel, using a Mesa 7.9 Gallium3D driver, and has a price between $150 and $200 USD? Or to find a motherboard that's working on Arch using a pre-2.6.34 kernel and costs less than $100 and has integrated graphics that work with the Nouveau driver? Seems like a challenge, right? Well, what if it was simply a matter of filling out a form to get such useful information? Something like this:

Where you would then get the unbiased facts about what's actually been used (just not reports of it working as with manually inputting your information or relying upon vendors that say a given driver will work with their just-released hardware).

And then with many results where you could also break down the matching results via real-time price / performance for matching candidates, all with just a few clicks of the mouse?

In just over a month you can find out with the launch of Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org during my Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices talk at the Southern California Linux Expo. More information will also be disclosed in the coming weeks about other yet-to-be-announced capabilities. As said before, OpenBenchmarking.org may become bigger and more powerful than Phoronix.com.

As some other food for thought until then, some new numbers as of this moment:

- More Than 220,726 Benchmarks Completed
- More Than 66,800 Systems Counted
- Tracking More Than 10,254 Reviews
- Statistics On More Than 321,458 Computer Components