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Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Desktop x86 Motherboard Manufacturers?

Posted by Soulskill on from the roll-your-own dept.

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).

4 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Intel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. MSI Claims SteamOS compatibility with X99 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    MSI X99 boards at least claim SteamOS compatibility out of the box.

    In my books that should mean Linux works.

    1. Re:MSI Claims SteamOS compatibility with X99 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Also looked at their BIOS Files. Looks like normal ZIP which contains the file that needs to be put to the pen driver for the UEFI self-update to work from the BIOS itself. No Windows required.

  3. Just wait a little by etherelithic · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.