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Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Desktop x86 Motherboard Manufacturers?
storkus writes: The release of Haswell-E and a price drop on Devil's Canyon has made me itch for a PC upgrade. However, looking around I discovered a pair of horror stories on Phoronix about the difficulties of using Linux on a multitude of motherboards. My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good? I'd like to build a (probably dual-boot, but don't know for sure) gaming and 'other' high-end machine with one of the above chips, so we're talking Z97 or X99; however, these stories seem to point to the problems being Windows-isms in the BIOS/UEFI structures rather than actual hardware incompatibility, combined with a lousy attitude (despite the Steam Linux distro being under development).
They're about as vanilla as it's possible to get, which is what you have to do to get anything working with minimal kernel module hacking.
It's the OSNews of the 21st Century.
Buy Gigabyte, their shit is rock solid.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You can disable UEFI and use CSM boot; it still works with Win 8.1. Asus Z87 boards worked fine with Ubuntu 14.xx for me.
Intel.
MSI X99 boards at least claim SteamOS compatibility out of the box.
In my books that should mean Linux works.
Some archive apps like WinRAR can extract files from self-extracting EXE files. Also look around for other softwares that can do this.
In some cases a command line option will allow the EXE to be extracted but not installed - but you have to do some digging.
Of course - the above is provided that you have at least one Windows machine around.
Also check around on the Motherboard manufacturer site - sometimes they offer both an EXE and a ZIP archive, and if nothing else contact their support. If nobody pesters them about the problem then they don't care.
And finally - also look at Tyan and Supermicro for motherboard, even though their target is server motherboards they may have some suitable motherboards for you.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Is setting a bunch of flags really a horror story? Really? How is this possible if you are BUILDING a computer?
Look, SteamOS isn't going anywhere or doing anything. Valve isn't going to make a fourth Console work, even by outsourcing the hardware work to a bunch of volunteers.
How much do you get paid to make these posts?
Be seeing you...
But I have built many of Linux systems on AMD/Asus platform. Not sure about the Intel stuff. But rarely have had any issues. YMMV.
I've built about 9 computers in the past 4 years and have run various flavors of Linux on all of them (mostly LTS builds of Ubuntu), and I've never had compatibility problems with the motherboard. Nowadays nobody can really afford not to support Linux, so I think the important thing is to wait a little while for the chipset drivers to get integrated into the newest builds of the Linux kernel, and then go from there. I've had issues with USB 3.0 support for an older CentOS version, but overall everything works for the most part. Linux even works better out of the box than a clean install of Windows 7 sometimes, because Win7 doesn't have drivers for a lot of common NICs, whereas Linux usually did. As you mentioned, in the latest computers I've built, the UEFI did give me more problems than traditional BIOS, but they weren't show-stoppers by any means, just a google search away from a resolution.
Pretty much this. Yes -1 Troll.
I've blacklisted Gigabyte, but only for motherboards after I've had one motherboard flash it's bios memory after every reboot a few times, it eventually screwed up and destroyed itself.
So far I've had a zero success rate on BIOS updates on ASRock as well. In order to get ASRock to properly BIOS update, it has to be done from the BIOS itself. If you do the update in any other way, it bricks the system.
Even Dell, ... I won't even go there.
Suffice it to say, no vendor should ever have a BIOS patch cycle as often as an OSS product, but every vendor should be making sure that all CPU and Chipset features are tuneables in the BIOS, and if they are broken, allow it to be turned off. It should not be up to the motherboard vendor to decide which features the user will not want to use.
Must be some kind of masochism. I really can see no other reason why people insist on getting wiped by MS time and again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And you think with the low margins the manufacturers have these days, they can do without that share? Wrong. Also people using desktop Linux are typically in the higher income levels and can not only pay for quality, they can recognize it, unlike the sheep. Of which you are clearly one. An aggressive sheep is still a sheep. Wolves are always a minority. What you are also completely forgetting is that a lot of these will actually run as servers. You know, because Linux does well as server, quite unlike Windows. But you would not know or understand that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
WTF is he talking about? I heard and saw nightmares with ASUS but MSI boards have always installed Linux instantly. They barely support UEFI as an afterthought and you can turn it off pretty easily.
It's a bit like that mistreated dog, comes back each day for the kick from his owner.
Nothing, I don't have to be paid to say something. You'll want whoever is shilling for Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Apple, Microsoft, or Valve.
Me? I just don't pretend there's going to be anything coming from Yet Another Linux Distro. If anybody even thinks of it in 5 years, I'll be surprised.
Windows 7 will likely still be on some people's Desktops though. Wait till you see how Microsoft makes Windows X-9000 really suck though.
I've built three boxes with MSI A75a-e35 and AMD A-8 and A-10 with no issues running Linux Mint 15/16/17, well except two of the boards had issues after 6 months. The replecement boards are working fine though.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Intel is closing down their motherboard lines. It pisses me off since they were all I'd buy in the past, but they aren't going to be an option for much longer :(.
And you think with the low margins the manufacturers have these days, they can do without that share?
Unfortunely, yes. No major motherboard manufacturer even cares about niche market. And the IC manufacturers, they don't really care, either.
Also people using desktop Linux are typically in the higher income levels and can not only pay for quality
Higher income buyers are buying trendy Apple, Andoid tablets and Microsoft laptops, not linux workstations.
they can recognize it, unlike the sheep
No, they just don't care about that. But you do get the smugness of the illusion that the manufacturer uses fairy dust instead of building it like everyone else.
Wolves are always a minority.
Now, you're just assuming stuff. I'd say wolves are quite the majority of animals in wolfpacks, and the major ingredient in wolf stoo.
What you are also completely forgetting is that a lot of these will actually run as servers. You know, because Linux does well as server
Who is using COTS desktop boards on servers? Traditionally, Intel desktop cpu lines do not support ECC memory. And you talk like there is no option for servers besides Linux.
You know, because Linux does well as server, quite unlike Windows
I assume you speak from experience. I'd blame it on the sysadmin, not the operating system.
But you would not know or understand that.
Get out of the basement sometimes. Try to vent out at least some of that frustration of yours.
People need to stop buying hardware that isn't properly supported under free software operating systems. Right now there are only a few companies, organizations, and individuals actively pushing for better support and the majority of those aren't the people who you'd think would be pushing it.
Companies/people on my bad list include companies like: System76, Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA, AMD, Linus Torvalds, and others who have been uncooperative and even hostile toward free software.
Then there are others who you'd more typically expect to be hostile: Dell, HP, Lenovo/IBM, Toshiba, Apple, and Sony to name a few. These companies are actively utilizing digital restrictions to prevent users from replacing incompatible parts with compatible parts.
This isn't even getting into the buggy BIOS problems and the fact every company is testing against Microsoft Windows rather than designing to standards-or that most are forcing propritary software down users throats (MS Windows licenses, the BIOS, and other firmware components).
This said Intel has been pretty good in some areas and so has HP. However I'd be weary about both companies in one regarded or another.
Some companies/organization/people on my good list:
ThinkPenguin, Inc (computer hardware and accessories)
Aleph Objects, Inc (makers of a 3d printer)
Adrian Chadd (formerly employed by Qualcom Atheros)
Luis R. Rodriguez (formerly employed by Qualcom Atheros)
Tehnoetic
I just upgraded to an i5 with a GA-Z87X-D3H mobo. I've got it triple-booting (GRUB has LinuxMint 17 or Windows Loader). If I select Windows, then the windows loader gives me the option of XP-32bit or windows 7-64bit. I can attest to the fact that it is the UEFI crap in the BIOS that causes issues, but once you turn it off, all the problems disappear. All in all, money well spent and I'm quite content
As always, YMMV
Good luck
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
Those horror stories mention Gigabyte and MSI.
No guarantees, but in my experience I use ASRock. At first I was very sceptical (they started out as budget boards) but my early Haswells work great on Linux.
I had a Gigabyte (now the Windows gaming machine) but when I tried to VT-d, Gigabyte BIOS didn't implement it despite the processor's support. ;-( Never looked back.
Replacing the bios might be hard, but if the vendors don't want to provide a good working product, then replace the bios with an open bios. I was looking at upgrading my current system, but if the common hardware vendors are being dicks, then I will look at supporting an open hardware vendor. As a PC user (not a laptop user), power management isn't as big an issue, but if a badly implemented bios results in a poor running computer, then I will be pissed. I have a list of vendors I'm never going to support again. If a vendor told me 'go use a different operating system', I would tell them to get into another line of business.
Its so extensive that it makes a good general reference when purchasing hardware.
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
Yeah Linux users like us are *totally* high income wolves! Thanks I have always thought that so Im glad somebody else does too! Awesome!
Have been using ASUS boards for linux-only computers for years, without any compatibility problems. BIOS updates come as a ZIP file that extracts into a BIN file that you can install from the BIOS itself: just download and extract the file to a USB drive from your favorite OS, then boot into the BIOS and perform the update, rebooot and all done.
They are not related. ASRock may have originated from Asus, but that was over a decade ago. They have long since been their own distinct, separate brand.
I built my machine on Gigabyte's motherboard over a year ago, no problems with multitude of linux distros I've installed there. And I ditched Windows, too.
Difficult to flash the BIOS is a horror story? How did Soulskill let this through with editing, or was this some sort of deliberate troll headline to generate hits?
How much do you get paid to make these posts?
Hehheh. The obligatory shill accusation comment.
Asked here about a year an a half ago:
Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Motherboard Manufacturers?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
or not... they sell boards with bent cpu pins and refuse to replace them. that's a dick move.
More like minor issues with a BIOS updater, and one shoddy implementation of power management.
Bad ACPI implementations tend to get blacklisted in the kernel, just like on Windows. Either way, Linux will still run just fine on these boards.
Actually, I'd expect more trouble with Windows on boards from these manufacturers, since at least MSI ships some pretty horrible 'support software' with their boards, to enable various board functions, and everyone knows how third party drivers and windows interact for that truly wonderful 'windows experience' or random unreproducible + undebuggable problems - particularly with cheap and nasty high volume far eastern parts (eg. on corporate LANs, certain very popular brand of network controller used on similar boards has a lovely driver for windows 7, that causes regular blue screens, when the network is under high load - no such problem on Linux).
There's no reason to stop beating your wife, she likes it.
Have used Gigabyte in 2 builds and Biostar with AMD dual core on one. All running linux. Have been using linux on my desktops since 2009. Without any issue with motherboard (except one below).
Stable wheezy wouldnt recognize ethernet on Gigabyte H87 board. Had to use a PCI card to get latest kernel and its been rock solid for more than a year.
I've been using Linux for about twenty years, still live with my parents, and have an actual neckbeard...
But I would never say anything like what you just said. That's how far gone you are, my friend.
> Why? EFI is convient.
EFI is an overengineered piecee of shit nobody (save those dreaming of consumer control) really needs. BIOS should just load the OS. Boards and chipsets should come with docs (yes, nowadays machine readable, in ROM) about how to set things up.
Not with backdoors (sometimes sold as remote management goodies).
I only skimmed the "horror stories", but as you said, they seem to be mostly about problems with updating the BIOS. The actual hardware support should work out of the box under Linux in nearly all cases, unless you want to get at really specific motherboard features. If you think you need those, you should know which ones exactly (they are probably the reason you'd chose this particular motherboard), and do some research if there are Linux drivers available.
Asrock offers BIOS updates for "Instant Flash" without an OS (e.g. Z97, random model). When I bought an Asrock motherboard some years ago, they didn't offer this for the particular model I bought, so I emailed their support. They mailed back that the BIOS update could be dangerous for early steppings of this board and this was the reason it was not publicly available; told me how to figure out my stepping, and gave me a link to an "Instant Flash" image I could use at my own risk. Can't complain about this.
So if you are worried about BIOS updates, it works just fine with Asrock motherboards according to my experience.
There's also a tool called "flashrom" that can flash the BIOS directly under Linux, but it doesn't work with all motherboards.
I think Linux support differs from model to model (as opposed to manufacturers). I'm using a Gigabyte Z87X-UD3 and I've had no trouble. I boot Xen with debian-testing since spring and using a Windows 7 guest as gaming platform (VT-d for those who wonder).
Previously I used Asrock Z68 for the same purpose.
However, my MB pre-buy research was based mostly on VMWare E??? (the one which supports PCI passthrough) feedback since VT-d was an "elimination" criteria.
I realize that people who treat open source as a religion with MS or Apple standing in for the devil will balk at the idea of running Linux under a more user friendly, more compatible, easier to maintain OS, but it actually works quite well for most applications.
It's not perfect. GPU performance takes a huge hit, so you'll probably want to shy away with it for hardcore GPU accelerated tasks, but the overhead in terms of CPU performance is negligible so long as you have the cores and the RAM.
And many distros support standard drivers such as VMWARE's. It's a lot better than running Cygwin or trying to hack OSX to get a good compile for open source Linux software in most cases.
Slashdot has been epically, if possibly inadvertently, trolled.
Google hardware for linux and you will find the Ubuntu hsl in moments. Bam, done.
Or, just pick any random board and install. You've got to be looking for incompatibility, outside a small minority of parts.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I boot freedos from a usb stick when I need to update BIOS. I don't see it as a problem; freedos is as free as linux is, and rebooting is necessary for bios updates anyway. .EXE-files for bios updating tends to run fine under freedos.
The first "horror story" is specifically regarding flashing BIOS from Linux via USB. I don't understand how this is related to modern motherboards - in fact, I see it as an issue that is disappearing. This is a situation I have had on OLDER, pre-UEFI motherboards - the requirement to run an EXE from an installed version of Windows, rather than from a boot floppy that didn't care what OS was installed. Many (including my Asrock) modern mobos can update right from the UEFI system without even spinning up the boot drive.
The second is specific to power management on laptops (I will admit to tl;dr speed-reading here), which is clearly not what the OP is talking about.
Tempest in a teacup. The ONLY thing that doesn't work so well with my dual boot system with my July 2014 Asrock motherboard is enabling the accelerated boot system which just makes plain sense, as it relies on caching a booted state to disk to skip a lot of init. I was at first nervous about UEFI, having read a ton of FUD a couple of years back, but it really is a non-issue. If anything, I like the low-level system management on my Asrock better than the old Award/Phoenix dominated BIOS systems.
It neglects to say which cities, which direction the ash is likely to spread, or provide a diagram to aid in that understanding.
I would generally go for Intel boards as Intel stuff is generally well supported by Linux...
Otherwise i would go for higher end boards aimed at servers or highend workstations - while manufacturers of cheap desktops generally ignore Linux, manufacturers of servers definitely can't and will ensure their boards contain appropriate components.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Sounds like MSI are being douchebags by putting a custom .exe archive (which most archiver software can usually open directly, by the way) inside a .zip file, but do you really need a complete Windows installation on the computer with the motherboard-to-be-flashed? Ever tried Windows LiveCDs like Hiren's?
Who is using COTS desktop boards on servers? Traditionally, Intel desktop cpu lines do not support ECC memory. And you talk like there is no option for servers besides Linux.
Far too many people are doing exactly this...
Smaller companies often have old desktops running as their "servers", no raid (or using the crappy bios fakeraid), no backups, no redundancy etc. Lots of cheaper servers are also based on desktop boards, and lots of budget hosting companies use such systems.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
They want their post back.
Seriously Linux motherboard compatibility nowadays is a good if not better(more legacy support) than the latest Microsoft OS.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Also people using desktop Linux are typically in the higher income levels and can not only pay for quality, they can recognize it, unlike the sheep.
Look, we can see that you are a Linux fanboy and want to defend it, but skewing the truth helps nothing. The quality of Linux desktop leaves lot to desire in terms of stability and performance when compared to Windows and Mac.
If your needs differ substantially from the server or compute markets (as with buying a cheap printer, or having laptop power saving actually work properly) you may indeed be pretty doomed. To the degree that you can overlap with the needs of server/compute on one end and embedded on the other, though, the market share of desktop boards isn't wildly relevant.
Yes, the SKUs differ; but nobody is going to go out of their way to make their product line more expensive to design and support by adding pointless differences(assorted features enabled or disabled, definitely; but playing NIH between product lines is rather pointless), so it's not clear what desktop Linux has to fear from low market share. If anything, things are far worse in mobile, where the market share is higher; but a substantial percentage of the hardware will do little more than boot a kernel and talk to a TTY somewhere unless you are using an Android BSP and a giant heap of blobs.
Fedora is the only major distro which is cryptographically signed by Microsoft-- so if you use it you can skip the difficult task of trying to deactivate SecureBoot (and keeping it deactivated, many bioses seem to randomly re-enable it), plus your machine stays secure... which is a nice perk.
Besides that, I bet most Linux users tend to be quite conservative in their hardware choices. They know that new hardware + Linux is a recipe for disaster and it's better to wait and see what works reliably. Some may even only run Linux on older or even hand-me-down hardware which is known to work.
That might change if Steambox / SteamOS took off and became a viable choice for gamers. Perhaps then the likes of Intel / NVidia / AMD and the board makers may pay more attention to supporting Linux properly from the beginning. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Ever. I've used motherboards from Dell, HP, Intel, Gigabyte (which had issues with windows interestingly, piece of shit and I'll never buy again), and Asus.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris and derivatives are all used over Windows for all but ASP.net crap due to massively superior (in terms of stability and performance) of their TCP/IP stack and mass-scale I/O dispatch systems (eg: epoll/kqueue).
Strictly speaking, kqueue is the most efficient (by orders of magnitude in extreme cases that no one but perhaps facebook or youtube would ever even possibly see, except they don't due to load balancing as a result of other bottlenecks like memory usage and/or bandwidth).
I/O completion ports on Solaris10+ and Windows aren't exactly impressive, licensing costs are ridiculous for mass-scale deployment, and lack of configurable kernels and/or networking stacks makes both Solaris and Windows less flexible, and really only viable for small-scale deployments (a hundred thousand concurrent users or less).
My main PC has an ASRock H77 Pro/MVP and I have zero problems with Fedora, all hardware recognized, UEFI works fine, CSM was disabled by default and I never bothered to turn it on, but most distros should work fine with it now.
What little free time I have I get to spend with my family, and generally, having a life. Please leave the basement once in a while.
You missed posting on Slashdot as an AC. Did that one not make you feel superior?
I've never had an issue running Linux (the kernel) on any motherboard I have every tried.
Please try to understand that 99% of angry posts on the Internet about how "this shit doesn't work" are really saying "I can't make it work because I don't know how and I'm mad."
I've installed Linux on systems I've built with Gigabyte motherboards for years. Works great. No problems. Even a Haswell mobo I got a year or so ago.
The key is Intel graphics. Linux works great with Intel graphics, but I have never gotten it to work reliably with any other graphics.
While there are still some issues, ASPM or whatever stupid power-saving functions you may find on MB just don't count.
They're just annoying, I mean, really fucking annoying. Everytime I install new Windows I have to manually turn off all these: monitor auto-off, CPU throttling, hard-disk auto-off, ASPM, USB suspend etc etc. How much money can you actually save by ASPM or other things? Nothing!
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/B85MG/
(Combined with a G1820)
I run Arch Linux on it, no problems so far.
I have had approximately 0 issues installing Manjaro (a ubuntified arch distro) on an ASUS motherboard with their bizzaro UEFI bootloader. Everything "just worked" with few, if any, changes to settings.
I've probably had more issues trying to get Windows to boot on this board, as 7, for instance, just refuses to boot in UEFI mode.
There's plenty of blame to go around on both sides here.
The motherboard manufacturers – pretty much all of them – are to blame for developing and shipping really crappy firmware. (Unfortunately, this is pretty much par for the course – 95% of all firmware is crap, no matter what it's for. Modern hardware companies, with a few obvious exceptions like Apple, just don't do software very well at all.)
The Linux kernel devs are to blame for being stubborn about "standards-compliance" versus the real world. From what I can tell in clicking through a few links, the ACPM feature was working in the past, but the kernel devs then deliberately broke it by changing it to only work if the BIOS advertises it properly. Yes, the standard says that's what is supposed to happen. But we know from experience that manufacturers often don't follow standards. Linux needs to deal with the world as it is, not as the devs wish it would be.
Msi, gigabyte, asus, and not by extension asrock since they are not and never have been related are not out, so why is this a slashdot story? Do we just publish any idiotic story here now?
If you *really* want to be sure of Linux compatibility, buy a workstation motherboard from, e.g., SuperMicro. The kit won't be cheap, and it won't come even close to "top GHz" but it will be stable as a mountain. ECC memory, Xeon or Opteron processors. And if you write SuperMicro support asking, e.g., for the parameters for the sensors chips, they will reply with the required formulae so that you can convert from raw readings to the real temperatures/voltages, etc.
Forget about BIOS/EFI upgrades, or overclocking. HP and Lenovo are the only workstation vendors which are bios-update-happy. Dell, Supermicro and the others release two or three such updates during the entire life cycle of the motherboard. Hell, you need to pester supermicro for a beta update to get the microcode updated!
You *will* need to put money into a proper soundcard, as well. These boards have übershit utterly noisy as all hell onboard audio. And pay attention to the storage ports as well, as the typical user would add a PCIe 3.0 x8 SAS 6Gbps RAID card that costs half as much as the motherboard, so they often don't have much in the way of on-board ports.
OTOH, if the other components are also good, it won't crash. Ever. They will happily run 24/7/365 at full blast for years.
I use them as my home servers, or at least the one I have an HDD for, it runs minecraft and ubuntu, and might have run truecrypt if all the computers that are primaries in my house didn't get upgrades recently.
BTW, TAILS(debian kernel) runs fine on my ROG MAX 6 extreme, just to try and answer the askers question(yeah, as an anon I have little chance of being looked at). According to their forums and other users they support devils canyon with a quick reflash(you use a USB and hit a button, not hard), which I've never heard of a problem with.
Rather than building one from scratch, you could buy a box that's certified to run Linux. Unlike the old days, I find that nowadays you really can't build a box any cheaper than you can buy one from companies like Lenovo or HP, and Lenovo has several boxen that are "Linux ready."
Personally I think my box-building days are over. I no longer play video games, so all I'm really interested in is a fast CPU and a PCI16 slot for my "silent" (no fans) video card, and audio and networking that are supported by Linux (which is pretty much everything Lenovo sells; I haven't looked into HP -- I don't like their reliability ratings.)
Regardless, I couldn't come up with pricing any better than about $800 + tax + shipping no matter how I scrounged, and that was only for a Core i5, not a Core i7. It's about another $150 to bump up to an i7, but I don't *need* a quad i7 for what I do. I'd *like* one, but I don't *need* it.
I think I'd get more of a performance boost out of using my PCI video card to offload the memory access from the CPU channels than I would out of bumping from an i5 to an i7.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good?
Are you kidding me?
If its a simple case of you being too lazy to disable UEFI in the bios, dont buy a motherboard with it.
All the manufactures you listed have boards without UEFI, find them before you buy without knowledge.
That seems backwards. The linux user isn't going to be pestering support to tell them which key is the 'any' key, attempting to hammer a VGA connector into a DVI port.
I have an Asus Z87 board, absolutely no problems whatsoever. I've booted several distros on it and it just works.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Ok, Ill feed the troll....
Niche market share of Linux desktop systems is (using the lowest percentage of 1.68%) is between 24,000,000 and 58,000,000 systems depending on whos numbers you use for the total number of systems. (Not even going into the fact that the % of share is a guess and ranges between 1.68% and 24% depending on who you look at)
It is estimated that around 90% of those users build there own systems.
Although the market share is small, the numbers are big and to some companies well worth the investment to try to capture some of that share.
I built a system last week with a: 1) i5 4690 2) asus z97-a
Then I installed a Fedora 20 (Mate Edition) and everything went fine but one thing. The installation kernel did not recognize the intel ethernet. I plugged in an old Realtek PCI, did a "yum upgrade" and with kernel 3.15 even the intel ethernet started working.
Hope it helps.
Must be some kind of masochism. I really can see no other reason why people insist on getting wiped by MS time and again.
Right now Sony is eating Microsoft's lunch with PS4 actually.
I think SteamOS has a good chance of doing well, especially given how close Linux is to MacOS. Mac marketshare is picking up, so hitting both with (more or less) a single port is attractive. Various game engines are also making cross-platform a lot easier.
Windows has had its heyday, it's definitely on the decline going forward.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Yeah, because there's absolutely no install base of Windows Server out there, and it sure doesn't run entire sectors of the economy worth trillions of dollars.
Are you high?
I run Linux (Fedora 20) on MSI motherboards almost exclusively. No problems. I just replaced an old MSI mobo with an nVidia/AMD based one, and the only thing I had to change was the MAC address in the network configuration, Linux came up perfectly.
I like to use ECC even on the desktop, and yes there are ways to do it. At a cost.
On the Intel side, the CPU is not really the problem. "Small" Xeons like the E3-1225V3 are attractive for their price/performance even if you run them on desktop boards and don't use ECC support. In that setup they are like i7 parts with slightly lower clock speeds.
For the board though, the choices are limited and you have to shell out an additional 100 Euros or more for a "small server" board, because the typical desktop chipsets don't support ECC.
Add the extra price for the ECC RAM, maybe 50 Euros difference depending on how much RAM you want, and you end up paying something like 150 Euros extra.
AMD used to be really nice, with most processors (pre-Llano all desktop parts but Sempron) supporting ECC RAM and some mainboards also supporting it. The mainboard choices for ECC support were a bit limited, cheapskates like Asrock usually did not bother to support ECC RAM. So you might have had to pay 10 Euros more for the board, plus the above 50 Euros extra for the RAM. Made maybe 60 Euros difference to have ECC RAM in your rig.
Sadly, their APUs don't support ECC. AFAIK the FX line still does, but it is not really attractive compared to recent Intel models.
C - the footgun of programming languages
'Any key' and 'wrong port' can be handled by FAQ or Indian guy reading from script - this is cheap. 'Audio does not work on weird distro X' requires immediate jump to at least level 2 support, which is more expensive by orders of magnitude.
...because Linux on the desktop is dead, and has been, for a very long time.
I didn't immediately think shill. The previous fourth console (OUYA) appears to have failed to take away any market share from the big three. What makes Steam Machine different?
I recently acquired an Asus Maximus VII Hero (Z97 chipset ofc, paired with a Devil's Canyon) and everything works out of the box with Mint 17. Not sure what you're raging about.
..they ought to take some laxatives.
Using Gigabyte Z97-D3H here, I plugged in my old hd with Arch Linux on it and it booted right away, no problems whatsoever with anything on it, then I installed windows 8.1 with qemu and passed through the nvidia card to run it as a gaming system on the 2nd monitor (qemu is freaking awesome now apparently).
Running it in mbr mode since the system was already installed and worked out of the box.
The only non-OS problem was that it ran the RAM at 1333, I had to go into the bios and change memory profiles to make it run at 2400.
So sad to hear Intel is going out of the mobo business. True, some were duds, but overall, my lappy's Intel and my desktop Intel have held out remarkably well over the years (they're both c.2008) and have accepted at least 3 iterations of Windows, 3 different Hackintosh versions and any Ubuntu since 8.10.
That is just it.
You are using Z87 based motherboards and the author wants to use z97 and or x99 based motherboards. It will be a little bit of time before those chipsets are fully supported.
Everybody writes Windows drivers for their own motherboards. You have to wait for the the community to write the drivers for Linux. You other option is to look in the server/workstation space. That market uses a lot of Linux and will tell you if it supported.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions some how Windows specific.
It seems unfortunate if we do the work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works without having to do the work.
Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.
Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this." Bill Gates, Jan 1999
- Go with a reputable motherboard vendor that will be there for the long haul (Asus, Gigabyte, or Intel)
- Get a workstation class board marketed specifically for workstations and durability, focus on the lifetime rating for capacitors/electronics and overall heat/thermal management. Ensure the system has nice diagnostics to help troubleshoot when critical components fail. These boards are generally $300-500.
- Wait for the motherboard to go through a few bios revisions and for the particular model to be added to one of the major distribution hardware compatibility lists (Redhat or Ubuntu).
- Check the motherboard manual to see if there are any limitations on ECC memory, frequently ECC memory is only supported at lower speeds and reduced sizes - generally go with boards with more comprehensive ECC memory support.
- When you have the option, choose motherboards with Intel parts for networking/etc and avoid Marvell and other parts from no-name or niche vendors (unless those vendors have a good record of supporting Linux with up-to-date patches to mainline kernel).
- If you want something commercially off-the-shell already fully built supported long term, you need to buy a workstation system marketed as Linux compatibile from a major vendor (Specific Dell Precision Workstation Models, HP) but the price markups on these will exceed most budgets.
Very odd. My Apple can run Linux. I guess you're just an incompetent.
I have 3 asrock based computers...two of them 970 extreme 3 mobos running Linux Mint debian. Bios upgrade from the bios menu is easy and quick.
How is the guy in the indian call center going to un-mash the pins?
What will actually happen is the user will return the board and say it looked like that when he got it.
> Yeah, because there's absolutely no install base of Windows Server out there, and it sure doesn't run entire sectors of the economy worth trillions of dollars.
>
> Are you high?
Entire sectors? Trillions?
I think that you are the one that's high, or deluded, or just incredibly clueless.
You need to stop confusing your personal consumer fixation with real work.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You read "a couple" stories of problems. As in TWO, out of millions. Most motherboards will be fine.
To be sure, a gaming board and a server board have similar requirements- plenty of memory slots, etc. Supermicro makes boards designed for Linux servers, which are frequently used for high-priority workloads.
If updating your BIOS is the *most* important feature of a motherboard, sorry.
I've never had a problem with MSI, Gigabyte or Asus . And the one time in a blue moon I had to update a bios, I simply booted off a USB HDD with windows on it.
Your deciding which car to buy based on how hard it is to adjust the cam shaft timing.
"Are you a "sheep" for buying an assembled car instead of building one from parts?"
Yes, in the hotrod and car guy world, those people are considered "poseur sheep", any moron can write a check. Real car guys build their cars. It's why corvette owners get zero respect at car shows unless the car is heavily modded and the guy has photos of the process.
It's the same as harley riders that pay for oil changes, They are not bikers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can easily hammer a VGA cable into a DVI port...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Hammer it alllll day long.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He was locked down there for a reason. nah they didn't throw away the key; it's just stuck up his butt
I think SteamOS has a good chance of doing well, especially given how close Linux is to MacOS.
LOL! "How close Linux is to MacOS?" About as close as FreeBSD and Darwin are, which is pretty much worlds apart.
Clicking through to the Phoronix link it's from October 2011 and the latest comments from November 2012. Hardly seems relevant when thinking about purchasing currently new hardware.
My Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H with i7-4790k and GTX 780 Ti is working near perfectly in Linux. The 'near' is because I have to implement a small workaround for an audio bug. From my /etc/modprobe.d/local-alsa.conf:
# Purpose currently to add 'snoop=0' to snd-hda-intel module options. This works around an issue that causes noisy/static/skipping audio. Something to do with CPU idle states. Apparently fixed by adding the PCI IDs into the driver so it uses a PCH workaround. Patch should be in 3.15-rc8 and later. options snd-hda-intel snoop=0
As much as calling people who want working computers 'sheep'.
They are more focused on the server and workstation markets, so might be a while before they have a ddr4 gaming board. They do certify compatability with a number of linux distros and freebsd (even if they list it as another linux distro). For example: http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/OS/Z87.cfm
I've used a number of their boards for servers and workstations, running linux and freebsd for many years. Most recently, I got one for a haswell xeon workstation. Net install with uefi and grub + uefi boot (mostly for kicks) works seamlessly. I've had no problems with the motherboard at all.
Actually, Intel contributes a lot of the code to support their chipsets. So you're not waiting for the community so much as waiting for intel to publish the drivers, and the distros to upgrade to a sufficiently new kernel to include them.
This is a piss poor analogy considering someone might want to buy a car specifically to modify the engine's components where ease of cam timing adjustment is a nice assed feature.
". So you're not waiting for the community so much as waiting for intel to publish the drivers, and the distros to upgrade to a sufficiently new kernel to include them.'
Ummm. I think you need to look up the word community sometime.
Intel and the distros are part of... now get this.... the community.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think you are going totally the wrong direction.... The author is correct that NONE of the desktop manufactures currently care anything about Linux Specific support of compatibility. Again the Desktop Market.
To get great *NIX Support, Top end Hardware, Computational Horse Power, and Torque; Go Look at Server Grade Mother Boards.
I just finished a test build of Gentoo in full UEFI mode on an Asrock Q87 board. The problem I discovered is pretty god damn simple. To get a UEFI aware install, You need UEFI aware media to boot in UEFI mode. Otherwise you're screwed.
The only media I'm aware of that works reliably in either mode is the System Rescue Live CD images (use Rufus to place on a flash drive). You then have to use the F11 key during boot to get to the UEFI Boot Manager (Part of the Specification) to select the media. If you don't see the flash drive the first time, reboot as the system did not detect it during post. Once it's visable, you can then choose to boot using either plain usb (bios) or uefi mode.
As I stated, it's a "Chicken and Egg" problem but once you've managed to boot into UEFI mode, you can install what ever flavor of Linux you want. In the case of Gentoo, You will need to use the System Rescue Disk/Flash to boot a working kernel to complete the installation of the boot loader (if using Gentoo you also need to enable the new kernel command line and enter on that the rootfs=partuuid followed by the id. Very important as most of the tools I've tested do not work well. This only applies if you're doing a pure UEFI boot (label the kernel bootxt64.efi and place it in the /boot/efi directory so the UEFI system can find it). Once you boot into the new working kernel (minimalism is you friend) you can finish the build.
I've found that a 16GB flash drive is actually large enough to hold the entire portage tree (offline installations are nice) and go from there. Makes it much easier when you're trying to diagnose a damn ethernet or wifi connection
You know how you can tell if youre still going through puberty? You worry about stupid shit like whether other people think youre a "real" this or a "real" that.
The typical reason that the word "sheep", "sheeple" etc. comes into a conversation is because the person throwing the word around has already decided they are morally and intellectually superior and cannot countenance another point of view.
ALI MotherBoards or how about VIA??
Hmm sound familiar?
I mean seriously people is it really that difficult. Or are there issues of complacency and stupidity?
If there's a BIOS or hardware issue with a board, but yet it works fine in Windows (probably because MS created a work-around), then guess what Linux users. Stop complaining, and PATCH YOUR OS!
See, this is the issue with Linux in general. If there is the tiniest glitch, or change in the hardware, it breaks the OS. And since there's only a handful of developers actually working on the Kernel (and they are doing it as a HOBBY at that), serious, show stopping issues, never get fixed.
Linux was, is, and always will be a hobbyist OS at it's core. Nothing more.
If you get one that's been out for 3-6 months, and is popular, it's got a really good chance of everything being supported. 9 months, and it's most likely got pretty much full support. If it's from a major manufacturer, and isn't targeted at a specific market, it's likely supported.
I bought a Gigabyte Series 7 m/b late last year. Back in Jan, my 6-yr-old m/b died, and I rebuilt my system. I run CentOS, same as RHEL, which is *not* "cutting" (or bleeding) edge like fedora, and *everything* was supported. Just watch out for FUD, and try to get some feel whether there's a *lot* of screaming out there about Linux not supporting something, or it's just one or two idiots making a lot of noise that's getting propagated.
mark
This is a bit like noting a number of minor manufacturers people never heard of failed to gain any marketshare in the early MP3-player market, therefore it was folly to expect Apple to succeed.
Except in this analogy, the "number of minor manufacturers" are companies like Fairchild (Channel F), Umtech (VideoBrain), Atari (2600/7800), Philips/Magnavox (Odyssey 2), Mattel (Intellivision), Coleco (ColecoVision/Adam), and NEC (TurboGrafx), and the Apples are Nintendo and Sony. It usually takes three tries for Microsoft to get something right (DOS 3, Windows 3, Surface Pro 3), and video game consoles were no different (Windows CE for Dreamcast, Xbox, Xbox 360). Valve, on the other hand, has shown that it can't even count to three (HL2, HL2 Episode 2, L4D 2, Portal 2).
I've used Gigabyte MBs exclusively for 15 years and I only run Linux. My latest MB is a Z87 with UEFI. No problems with Linux. Boots to usable desktop in under 10 seconds. No problems booting Linux off a USB stick either. During these 15 years I've never had a Gigabyte MB fail.
NVIDIA, AMD
Nvidia is pushing free 3D! drivers for their Tegra chipsets. Many AMD motherboards support coreboot.
Hi. I have opted to get DELL system with Ubuntu recently to be on safe side. Something to consider as well.
Servant of karma
And you think with the low margins the manufacturers have these days, they can do without that share?
Unfortunely, yes. No major motherboard manufacturer even cares about niche market. And the IC manufacturers, they don't really care, either.
If no major motherboard manufacturer even cares about niche market then I would ask you to explain all of the boards that are targeted towards multi-GPU setups and overclocking which are both small minority niche markets.
Also people using desktop Linux are typically in the higher income levels and can not only pay for quality
Higher income buyers are buying trendy Apple, Andoid tablets and Microsoft laptops, not linux workstations.
I beg to differ on this one as well. Just look at what Linux admins or really anyone with Linux skills gets paid compared to Windows admins. Not a single person that I know who really knows tech buys Apple, or Microsoft products (other than Windows for gaming)
they can recognize it, unlike the sheep
No, they just don't care about that. But you do get the smugness of the illusion that the manufacturer uses fairy dust instead of building it like everyone else.
I would say that most people who do not recognize quality in tech tend to buy things like Apple products or pre-built systems that are normally very cheap components. People who know a little more might buy things like ECS or Foxcon motherboards that in my experience are not worth even thinking about as they tend to be less compatible and have lower quality components like capacitors that are being pushed to their limits which causes them to break down much more quickly. Higher end manufacturers do not normally see these problems even though it has happened.
Wolves are always a minority.
Now, you're just assuming stuff. I'd say wolves are quite the majority of animals in wolfpacks, and the major ingredient in wolf stoo.
Umm...ok
What you are also completely forgetting is that a lot of these will actually run as servers. You know, because Linux does well as server
Who is using COTS desktop boards on servers? Traditionally, Intel desktop cpu lines do not support ECC memory. And you talk like there is no option for servers besides Linux.
I actually have used desktop components for servers quite a lot. I do make sure there is redundancy and for a small business they really do not need anything more. Also in my experience good quality desktop components are just as stable and last just as long as server components. Besides who cares if the system lasts for 5 years or 10 years when it should be considered too slow to be useful after 3 years?
You know, because Linux does well as server, quite unlike Windows
I assume you speak from experience. I'd blame it on the sysadmin, not the operating system.
I have run many different Windows and Linux servers and have worked for hosting providers that host 1000's of websites and other applications on both and I can say from experience that Windows uses a lot more resources, is much slower and is much less stable than Linux, and in many cases Linux is quicker and easier to get setup and running, although not always quite as straightforward as Windows. In my book stability and low overhead are key factors in making a good server and Linux easily beats Windows on that.
But you would not know or understand that.
Get out of the basement sometimes. Try to vent out at least some of that frustration of yours.
...desktop motherboards are usually far less well supported.
Smaller companies often have old desktops running as their "servers", no raid (or using the crappy bios fakeraid), no backups, no redundancy etc.
Smaller companies often have no servers and have everything online, or have a in-house NAS and a bunch of desktops. This isn't the nineties anymore. Some corner shops may still have a couple of desktops doubling as servers (yah, I've seen it), but it is not that common.
Lots of cheaper servers are also based on desktop boards, and lots of budget hosting companies use such systems.
Just because they are in a rackmount case, it doesn't make them "servers". And most providers describe in detail the hardware, and will give you explicit option for an entry-level server solution - you get what you choose to pay for. If you're dumb enough to get an i7 "server" with 32GB of RAM for database work, its your problem, not theirs.
Most desktop gear isn't even designed for a 24/7 operation, let alone having to support the cpu running at full capacity and indefinite amount of time. Desktop gear is not designed, both from a thermal and electrical perspective, for this kind of operation.
It depends on how you do it. You seem to be stuck in the big-iron age. Not every job needs one of them these days. Redundancy can take many forms, not only technical ones.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unfortunately, you have you head up you backside. Even a SunOS desktop 25 years ago was fundamentally superior to what MS has these days. True, MS is slowly catching up, but you people are being fed consumer crap and you do not even realize it. Talk about Stockholm Syndrome.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, when the technological development is not finished yet, it does very much make you a "sheep".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There are some Windows servers even in finance infrastructure. They universally turn out to be a constant pain, a security nightmare, a performance bottleneck and are always only used to run services for Windows clients that cannot deal with standard interfaces and protocols. Nobody, for example, is migrating from Solaris to Windows. I know of several instances where migrations from Solaris to Linux are planned, to get rid of Oracle.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem with desktop Linux is that while it is a great operating system it isn't significantly better in any way than the incumbents so ultimately people don't use it because there is no benefit. It suffers the chicken and the egg problem, vendors don't support it, so people don't use it, so vendors don't support it, and so on...
The operating system exists to run programs, whether I use Photoshop on OS X or Windows makes no difference, it's the same but I can't run it on Linux. How and why would professional photographers use Linux? Or what if you're doing architectural or product design and visualization? Structural analysis, engineering and simulation? Various manufacturing process simulations (compression molding, injection molding, composite over-molding, 3d printing, milling, etc...)? Factory design? Mechanical simulation? Video editing? CAD/CAM/CAE? Even most office workers use Windows or Mac because they use MS Office.
Many Linux advocates focus on the operating system but forget that people don't care about the operating system, they need it to actually do things. Linux is great for embedded applications, servers, re-purposing old outdated desktop hardware or installing on the PC of less computer-literate people that only want to edit basic documents, send/read email and browse the web but click any popup ad (because the lack of popularity means it isn't a target for malware) but for professionals in almost any field it is unsuitable because the required tools to actually do work do not run on it.
If no major motherboard manufacturer even cares about niche market then I would ask you to explain all of the boards that are targeted towards multi-GPU setups and overclocking which are both small minority niche markets.
You say they are small. They aren't. They are the beef of the desktop market - hardcore gamers.
I beg to differ on this one as well. Just look at what Linux admins or really anyone with Linux skills gets paid compared to Windows admins. Not a single person that I know who really knows tech buys Apple, or Microsoft products (other than Windows for gaming)
You can differ as much as you want. Competent Linux admins and Windows admins are paid about the same. Less on the linux side for most run-to-the-mill LAMP setups, more on Windows side for enterprise. You pay for competency first, and any above-average sysadmin will be proficient in several systems, not only Linux. But in the end, techies are a minority, way smaller than gamers. And just because you're a sysadmin, it doesn't mean you can distinguish good gear from bad gear. Lots of techies I know do use Linux. And FreeBSD. And DragonFlyBSD. And Windows. A good techie isn't usually a one trick monkey. The sooner you learn it, the faster you'll grow.
People who know a little more might buy things like ECS or Foxcon motherboards that in my experience are not worth even thinking about as they tend to be less compatible and have lower quality components like capacitors that are being pushed to their limits which causes them to break down much more quickly.
Actually, Foxconn are usually replicas of Intel desktop silks. When a chipset is released, it is often accompanied with reference schematics that are - basically - a skeleton version of the reference board for that chipset. Foxconn usually mimics it to a point where you can hold both motherboards and they seem to differ only in color. So they usually are as compatible as one can be.
Regarding "pushing capacitors to the limit", isn't really about that. Its about electrolyte degradation. And this can happen with any major manufacturer, as they don't control every step of the supply chain.
People that know what they're buying are buying ready-made workstations from Dell or HP or Apple, or building it with Tyan, SuperMicro or similar gear. Coincidentally, both Dell and HP are huge players in the server market, and they use Foxconn factories.
I actually have used desktop components for servers quite a lot. I do make sure there is redundancy and for a small business they really do not need anything more. Also in my experience good quality desktop components are just as stable and last just as long as server components. Besides who cares if the system lasts for 5 years or 10 years when it should be considered too slow to be useful after 3 years?
Yah, that shows. You're "that" kind of guy. Let me ask you, assuming you're running eg. databases on those servers, what happens when a bit is flipped on in memory and a write operation commits 0x10FE credit instead of 0xFE? Your redundant system will replicate this and silently propagate the error. Or when a block is misread from a single disk instead of using parity check? Are your clients aware that this can happen? Have you explained it to them?
I have run many different Windows and Linux servers and have worked for hosting providers that host 1000's of websites and other applications on both and I can say from experience that Windows uses a lot more resources, is much slower and is much less stable than Linux, and in many cases Linux is quicker and easier to get setup and running, although not always quite as straightforward as Windows.
So, you have Windows and Linux experience on a very narrow field. Good for you. I can actually setup an OpenBSD server way faster than you can install most Linux distros, does it mean its a good replacement for every workload? Not
That's nothing: Intel "Advanced Management Technology" (AMT), has an embed CPU in the chipset that runs a small webserver (Enabling you to remotely control a few settings) and a VNC server (So you can have remote screen/mouse without needing neither a KVM nor OS collaboration).
It's a technology available on most enterprise-oriented servers, workstations and desktops. (Makes life of sysadmin easier).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
ASROCK did have a period where they were doing some weird stuff. Remember the adaptable CPU slot things that they did for 939/AM2 IIRC but most of that weirdness was for AMD mobos
Of course, that will be for AMD only. At that time, only AMD did have the memory controller embed in the CPU.
The CPU itself communicated with a very standard HyperTransport bus with the chipset.
So you could easily have either:
- swappable CPU+RAM boards on a HT backbone (common in the server & cluster world)
- swappable CPU board if they had the same type of memory connection (both 939 and AM2 used 2x DDR2)
And for the record, Intel started this whole business with the "Slot" form factor on their Pentium 2/3/Celeron (all can connect the same way to 440BX chipset).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I recently build a new PC, based on an Asus motherboard which has UEFI, but there is no problem what so ever with running linux on it. ...
The build-in wifi works, USB3 works, BIOS is updatable with a USB key,
You just need to use a recent distro that has support for UEFI (Ubuntu & SteamOS both worked for me).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.