[conspire] new computer?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> The discussion about disk drives caused me to think, Why don't I just
> replace the whole thing, especially with Black Friday approaching.

Yeah, you could do that cheaply.  You _might_ end up with a system with 
few or no Linux driver issues, but the odds are against you even if you 
avoid Nvidia chipsets (which would be a good start).

Back in the latter 2000s, I did all evaluations for Cadence Design
System of proposed new systems (servers, desktops, and laptops) the firm
might wish to standardise on, for driver compatibility with Linux
(various RHEL and SLES) and Solaris.  So, I got to play with a lot of
spanking-new computers, and could have told you a lot _at that time_
about what motherboard, etc. chipsets to avoid for reasonable compliance
with the Linux disto installers of the day.  The specifics I knew are of
of course long past their expiration date.  Some general guidelines are
timeless.

One:  If you honestly want no hardware-support problems, avoid buying
anything with a chipet that hasn't been on the market at least a year.
The simplest way to ensure that is to buy a _system_ model that's been
offered for sale for at least a year.  (Even then, there are occasional
gotchas where an OEM has slipstream-changed the constituent parts of a 
PC system without bothering to change the model number.  Dell is
particularly infamous for doing this.)

Two:  In turn, the easiest way to ensure that the PC model you buy has
been on the market for at least a year is to buy used, not new.  Novices
fear to do this because they think they need high-end spec hardware to 
run Linux, an assumption that's hilarous to us old-fogies who know Linux
typically _lowers_ the hardware requirements compared to proprietary
OSes the hardware was built for.

Three:  Yeah, try to stay away from Nvidia chipsets, because good
support for them tends to take a bit longer still.  

Four:  If you see Broadcom or Marvell components, e.g., ethernet or
wireless, there's a good chance you'll be hassled a bit, if only by the
need to acquire and install firmware BLOB files that the distros cannot
lawfully bundle into their installers.


Hey, here's an idea:  You buy a brand-new system on Black Friday, and
then get frustrated by various dumb Linux driver problems or some new
equivalent of the infamous Intel Skylake instability problem of two
years ago that took a half a year and several kernel revisions to thrash
out.  (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html)  Then, a year later, I
buy that system off you, used, at half price.  Deal?  ;->