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<div>I also use a computer until it becomes a problem.</div><div>Meanwhile, I found two links regarding AMD and Linux.</div><div><br></div><div>Official AMD support for Linux</div><div><a href="https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-prorad-lin-18-30" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-prorad-lin-18-30</a></div><div><br></div><div>And on debian.org<br></div><div><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo</a></div><div><br></div><div>There are many more pages. So if I do go shopping, I would look for AMD processor.<br></div><div><br></div>
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On Tuesday, November 20, 2018, 3:22:06 AM PST, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
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<div>Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (<a href="mailto:mail@webthatworks.it" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mail@webthatworks.it</a>):<br><br>> I tend to use computers till some of their parts start to be<br>> unreliable.<br><br>Same here, though in many cases I've given them away before that.<br><br>Some of the difference in our perceptions may trace to just the fact <br>of Silicon Valley being atypical. At any given time, there's a great<br>deal of slightly used and very good hardware floating around (along with<br>a great deal that isn't good, of course). Machines two years old can,<br>if you poke around, be found in peak condition at high discount.<br><br>Speaking for myself, I also got really good at avoiding hardware (and<br>hardware components) that's likely to have either reliability or<br>software-support problems for a very long time, (mostly) unconsciously <br>implementing Moen's Law of Hardware.<br><br><a href="http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-hardware" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-hardware</a><br><br> Moen's Law of Hardware <br><br> After years of helping people with hapless computer-hardware woes,<br> especially trouble-prone categories such as Linux on laptops, exotic<br> peripheral interfaces, etc., it occurred to me to wonder why I never had<br> such problems. It was mainly because of instinctive avoidance of dodgy,<br> exotic, new, and/or badly designed components -- which happens to track<br> strongly with programmers' characteristic prejudices. There's a logic to<br> that, which may not be immediately apparent to many:<br><br> Drivers for hardware don't emerge like Athena from the head of Zeus:<br> Someone has to create them. Especially for open-source OSes such as<br> Linux, this involves a chipset being brought to market, for it to be out<br> long enough for coders to buy and start using it, and for them to (if<br> necessary, absent manufacturer cooperation) do the hard work of<br> reverse-engineering required to write and debug hardware support. Then,<br> the resulting code filters out to various OS distributions' next<br> releases, and thus eventually to users.<br><br> It follows that, if you blithely buy what's new and shiny, or so badly<br> designed or built that coders eschew it, or so exotic that coders tend<br> not to own it, it will probably have sucky software support, especially<br> in open source. (Proprietary drivers can be written under NDA, often<br> before the hardware's release, while manufacturer help is routinely<br> denied to the open source world.) Conversely, if you buy equipment<br> that's been out for a while, doesn't suffer the (e.g., Diamond<br> Multimedia) problem of chip-du-jour, is bog-standard and of good but not<br> exotically expensive quality, it will probably have stellar driver<br> quality, because coders who rely on that hardware will make sure of<br> that.<br><br> Thus, it's very common for slightly ageing but good-quality gear to<br> outperform and be more reliable than the latest gee-whiz equipment,<br> because of radically better software support — not to mention the price<br> advantage.<br><br> Ergo, in 1999, instead of buying a current-production laptop to run<br> Linux on, I bought, used, a Sony VAIO PCG-505TX, because I knew several<br> Linux kernel coders had been using those as primary machines.<br> Performance and stability have been exceptional.<br><br> More broadly, if you can identify the types of gear programmers would<br> favour — and avoid — you'll be ahead of the game. Coders would avoid<br> winmodems / winprinters, brand-new 3D video chipsets, cheesy and<br> unsupported SATA "fakeraid" chipsets, low-end scanners reached through<br> parallel ports ganged to ATAPI ganged to SCSI chipsets, cheap<br> multifunction scanner/printer/fax boxes, hopelessly proprietary USB aDSL<br> bridge cards, etc. They would favour parts of standard interface,<br> command-set, and chipset design and high enough quality that they might<br> be reused in multiple machines over a long service life.<br><br>That's a rather old lexicon-page entry, as witness the reference to<br>winmodems. However, I've found it to still voice general truth.<br><br>> A really big slice of economy now run on Linux. No one would be so<br>> crazy to put on the market "common hardware" that can't run Linux<br>> and nowaday chipset are highly coupled with the CPU (so coupled I'm<br>> not aware of any chipset made by 3rd parties other than the CPU<br>> maker).<br><br>Well, I just mentioned about the very recent Intel chipset that was<br>quite terrible for Linux (instability) for the better part of a year<br>after it was already the basis for wildly popular PC models. That's<br>really not that uncommon among brand-new motherboard/CP chipsets, sadly.<br><br>> Notable exceptions are: wifi for notebooks, video boards, ethernets.<br><br>Well, here's what happens quite a bit: Broadcom (say) introduces yet<br>another cheap ethernet chipset that is only a tiny bit different from<br>the prior one, and probably works with one of the existing Linux open<br>source drivers with little or no modifiction, except for one little<br>problem: It has a new PCI ID identifier, which means that kernel<br>autoprobing will not know what driver to modprobe for it. So, all those<br>customers buying it as new hardware for Linux will be mystified at the<br>apparently unsupported ethernet hardware. _Very_ determined users may<br>read a technical analysis or figure out the problem and patch the PCI<br>IDs database to compensate, but otherwise users will need to await a new<br>packaged kernel incorporating the PCI IDs update.<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>conspire mailing list<br><a href="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br><a href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br></div>
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