@Hello Damon:
Linux is pretty good w/ hardware support, especially the new OSs of any major distro.
Specialized Linux spins may be more problematic, but it's still not as bad as it was @ the turn of the century. Most articles that warn against hardware incompatabilities are using information regurgitated from around that time.
Stick with thae major distros and you should be fine.
When you become more adept w/ Linux, in general, then you might want to start disto hopping. You'll know when that is if you play with your system enough.
Okay, I thought this might be a good place to drop this...
(This is for people with an ancient system sitting around collecting dust)
An acquaintence of mine had a game camera and wanted to just view the pics on his computer.
No internet required, nothing else required, just a picture viewer.
They were going to buy a new laptop just for that.
When I asked them about the old one sitting on the desk, they said it was junk.
They let me check it out - nothing wrong w/ it, just old; and I mean Reeeeeeeeealy old.
That sucker was ancient - were talking Pre-Pentium 3.
I tried out a bunch of different OSs that I never had a problem with on my ancient P4 system, and they all had glitches on that CRT display w/ DDR1 RAM (an entire 512 MB of it - lol.)
I asked them if I could work on it - save them the cost of a new machine.
If I couldn't get it to work, no loss.
I did some searching, and came across Haiku OS.
It was still in Pre-Beta
Burnt it and played w/ it on a live disk, on the machine.
For a single purpose computer, that OS kicked ass.
Even with only 512 MB of DDR1 RAM, I could load and view over 150 pictures, (full size and most of them over 1MB.) before the system started to slow down - clicking through them as fast as I could punch the mouse button.
The beauty part was that the system never locked up on me.
Haiku OS has been in Beta now,
since 2018.There was one of the two RAM slots open, so I dumped a 256MB RAM stick in it (I had laying around,) and it took care of the slowdown afterr 150 or so, pics.
Boot time for that OS also went down to about 5 seconds or less.
She handled SD cards and USB just fine.
So, what's my point ?
1. With Linux (or BSD - for more advanced users,) where there's a will, there's a way.
2. Those old machines can be re-purposed, saving you some jing.
3. It's more than just a WinDoze world out there.
4. Single purpose machines have a place, and Linux / BSD can help you bring that purpose to fruition.
5. Haiku doesn't run XORG., and the interface is instantaneously quick.
Some of the
strong points of BeOS (from 1998)
Here's a
2018 review of the Beta - w/ screenshots; for those that are interested.
If you want to play w/ the live disk / USB
