Hey all. Going to take advantage of dellrefurbished sale. Dell is all abour Ubuntu. But I’d like to play around with LMDE.
Anyone running LMDE on Dell Precision? If so, how’d it go?
Edit: oh well, dellrefurbished doesn’t ship to Canada. Question still stands.
This is the wrong question. The question is "Does Linux have support for this laptop (wifi, gpu, mux if it exists, etc.).
The difference between distributions is generally not that significant[1] when it comes to hardware support. They’re just “re-bundling the same things in different ways”. But the Linux kernel is the Linux kernel on all of them. If it doesn’t support your WiFi chip on Ubuntu then it likely won’t support it on Debian. And if it does support it on Ubuntu then it likely supports it on Debian/Fedora/immutable-flavor-of-the-week.
That said - Dell is not “all about Ubuntu” - they support Linux on select products. And they also support RedHat. With systems not in their list of supported ones you’ll want to google the make/model as well as “support Linux” to see if you can find whether anyone else has run into issues with something not working and what you might be in for if it doesn’t.
[1] I await the army of pedants telling me about that one thing on their distribution that is different.
Yes. The installed kernel version is what defines your general compatibility with hardware, not the actual distribution you choose.
That’s a good clarification - different distributions may have different versions of the Linux kernel. So you may see “It works on Ubuntu but not Fedora” due to them shipping different versions of the kernel. But typically that would be due to recently added support (the distribution using a newer kernel works). Eventually things homogenize.
up to AMD Ryzen 7XXX and Intel 13xxx Should Work just fine, and at most you may have to use the Debian backport Kernel 6.5 soon to be 6.6, and or pop a new wifi card in it as Dell ships some shitty wifi cards.
https://backports.debian.org/ btw LMDE has backports enabled by default.
I have a new Dell laptop with LMDE on it. The laptop works just fine, all my apps are from flathub other then the ones that shipped with LMDE.
Try https://www.dellrefurbished.ca
Generally speaking, if Ubuntu works, LMDE will work as well. Unless you have something that is brand brand new with drivers only located in a bleeding edge kernel, you shouldn’t have any issues.
I have LMDE on an old XPS17 and it actually worked with less fuss than standard Ubuntu, mainly because of compatibility with a truly ancient wireless chipset.