I know Linux since Slackware 2.0, so I am quite used to these issues regarding graphics cards, including the fun days of manually writing my own xorg.conf file.
Eventually one gets fed up and wants the laptop just to work.
I remember those times as well, but my recent experiences with new hardware on Linux have been rather positive.
As long as you avoid hostile vendors like Realtek and NVIDIA everything should just work.
Re:Intel patches new ME vulnerabilities
by michaelmrose on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @04:33AM
(#17599117)
Tried buying ones that come with linux? Alternatively stuff known to work well with linux like thinkpads?
This laptop came with Linux that was the point of buying in first place.
Asus used to sell their netbooks with Ubuntu pre-installed on the German Amazon store.
It already had a phase where I couldn't use WiFi for a couple of months as Ubuntu decided to replace the binary driver for an open source implementation partially working, and then fix issues as they came.
Now it is the same story regarding ATI drivers.
The fact that they are open source is of course a good thing whats not is that they were at one time less than half the performance.
The new drivers from AMD gpus are both open source AND performant.
Basically the proper strategy 2003-2017 was to buy nvidia and install the binary drivers.
At present you can go with either so long as you aren't buying hardware too old to be supported by the new amd drivers. I'm still using nvidia on all my hardware but maybe I will give amd a try again next time around.
It sucks that its complicated but its not as complicated as it seems.