My laptop is an MSI Sword 15 A11UD. But I’m really looking for a program that analyses and projects problem areas and supported/unsupported hardware
There is a website to check which hardware is supported (on which distro). You can look up your laptop there, but beware that it is crowdsourced, so there might have been tinkering involved before submitting the results or the results may be outdated.
Click on “probe your computer” then check the results to see what your current setup supports.
you could also just boot to a live distro and test your hardware. id recommend mint
FAFO is always the ol’ reliable
live distro usbs will help with that as others said.
Nvidia? Install pop os
I just looked at pop os, doesn’t seem like a bad option, what are the downvotes about?
I do have Nvidia btw, does that=problems?
Generally, yes. It’s not nearly as bad as say 2015 but NVidia has a long standing history of being difficult to deal with, and users having to make constant compromises. For instance, NVidia hasn’t had properly working Wayland support on most environments until recently due to the awful flickering that many users experienced. Things like power saving, dual GPU handoff, general OpenGL performance, frame stability and tearing (X.Org), etc. have been either historical and/or current pain points for using NVidia GPUs vs AMD or Intel GPUs.
Managing drivers for nvidia is a constant headache for the nvidia linux community. Pop os devs manage them for you (with a QA team) with pop os so your system never breaks from a bad nvidia update
Downvotes probably from snarky “arch btw” users that like to micromanage their system
Downvotes probably from snarky “arch btw” users that like to micromanage their system
Wtf. This is actually snarky for absolutely no reason. It could be anyone and you just pick out of the blue arch. And no, I don’t use Arch directly, but that has nothing to do with it (I would comment this if you mentioned any other distro too).
