What hardware is suppored by Linux? Almost all of it!

About a decade ago, it was often a problem to get hardware to work with Linux. Even if the device in question was somewhat supported, the Linux drivers available for it at the time may not have been of a very high quality. So your options were to wait until other people improved the driver, improve the driver yourself, or acquire different hardware. There were a variety of lists that would indicate how well certain pieces of hardware were supported. But thankfully, things have changed quite significantly since then.

For the past several years, I have found that virtually all of my hardware works immediately with the general-purpose Linux distributions, especially Ubuntu. Part of the reason for this may be that I tend to buy higher-quality hardware from the better-known companies, even if it is somewhat more expensive. A greater corporate interest in Linux, from both hardware vendors and hardware users, no doubt helps the situation, as well.

So although a list of Linux-compatible hardware is useful, it is not the necessity that it once was, even just five years ago. These days, two users with completely different hardware from completely different manufacturers can easily have 100% support when using the same installation disc for a widely-used Linux distribution such as Ubuntu. That’s a sign of true maturity.