Yes, about all that old Windows 10 hardware.....

[artytux]

as Linux cannot readily support all hardware or run the programs that Windows can out of the box.

With a little effort it's easy enough to find out if the hardware, cpu's or anything else will work on Linux, yeah nah oh that's why Win users usually stay as Win users, Yawn ohh that that's effort and what's the point Windows is good enough they say, that's neighbors and people I know.

No-one has to wait the long times as in the past to use latest Intel these days the say Intel gen14 with ARC graphics within 3 months of release on Linux it's ready to roll.

[DukeComposed]

The best OEM images I have come across are the ones from Panasonic for their Toughbooks, with no crapware, but useful tools (such as the PC Information Viewer, which is a lot like our QSI utility).

Toughbooks are amazing little machines. I once wound up on a consulting team who had a client contact us with some Windows-based Toughbooks, and they wanted to know if they could convert them to Linux.

You know what's tough? Old stuff that's had its tires kicked a whole bunch.

So all of the Panasonic Toughbook hardware was pretty old, compared to the comparable laptops of the day. Putting Red Hat on a Toughbook was going to be easy.

Except for the screen.

The Toughbook graphics driver was proprietary and, after some research, the one company who had a Linux driver for Toughbooks was very princess-and-the-pea about it. Their Linux driver was closed-source and invitation only. We asked about licensing it from them. They asked why. We said we were interested in customizing a Linux distro for a Toughbook for limited usage and testing, which was true.

They wrote back something like "Hmmmm, sounds suspicious. Thanks but no thanks."

I hope that Toughbooks have an open source graphics driver by now.

[AK-47]

@DukeComposed I presume they thought you were terrorists because you wanted to get the graphics driver to work on Linux?
Now a days they use the Intel HD graphics so no issue with Linux graphics on these units. The backlight may need some extra config (depending on the unit) to get it to work but that's about it.

[DukeComposed]

@DukeComposed I presume they thought you were terrorists because you wanted to get the graphics driver to work on Linux?
Now a days they use the Intel HD graphics so no issue with Linux graphics on these units. The backlight may need some extra config (depending on the unit) to get it to work but that's about it.

The company, allegedly, already had a functional Linux graphics driver for Toughbooks. They just didn't like sharing it. I don't remember the details exactly. I think they had a stipulation on their website that they offered their driver to specific inquiries on a case-by-base basis and refused any reselling of their software. Since we were consultants, I think technically selling or leasing their driver to us on behalf of a customer could be seen as reselling it.

Regardless of the fact we were only asking on behalf of our client and had no intentions of duplicating our work for anyone else, the driver company felt spooked and declined to work with us.

I had, for the project, a Toughbook I could use as a reference. They're neat little machines. Almost literally bulletproof. But after that negative experience with a pissy driver vendor, I never bought one for myself and, unless I see proof of an incredible Linux-only experience on one, I doubt I ever will.

[needmorebrains]

Every single computer I have owned (fill in OEM here) with a pre-installed version of Windows on it (since about W95) had to be re-installed very soon after purchase due to improper file awareness. Most of the time, it was because the hardware was not identified properly, or a file was corrupt in the compressed file, and failed to expand properly, and that holds true up to today.

That is highly unusual. Major OEMs like Dell, HP, Gateway, and so on don't individually install Windows on each machine. They build a base image with all the added stuff, the unhelpful "Dell(TM) Awesome Center" software pre-installed, and they add all the drivers into the image that they then have written onto the disks before they get installed. You shouldn't have driver problems with the default install of the OEM-provided OS, so if you've had bad images on literally every disk you've bought it sounds like you may be the common factor, or something happening with delivery of the machines along your mailing route, or a huge magnetic iron deposit under your house, or something. Having no machines with the pre-installed OS working correctly out of the box just seems improbable considering the volume of devices the big OEMs produce.

Drivers used to be much harder to manage in the era before you could download something like Snappy Driver Installer Origin and get really extensive device detection for all of the unique buses and ports in an obscure, one-off Dell Dimension model that was only sold to people in Nebraska and in Utah, for four months, in 2003. There were serial port drivers to worry about, LPT drivers, something called a UART. You might have separate physical cards installed in the machine for video, sound, network, and maybe even one for a joystick. It was nuts. And you couldn't always trust Windows to find its own drivers for you, which meant you kept the "Drivers" CD that came with the machine, forever, in case you needed it.

Now that pretty much every machine just has USB, HDMI, and DisplayPort ports, any conventional install of Windows or Linux is going to work on most consumer-grade machines built from ten to one or two years ago. Manufacturers aren't including as many weird devices as they used to, motherboards have more integrated onboard devices than ever, and the era of just making everything a peripheral with its own extra ISA or PCI card is over. This all makes it far less terrifying these days than it used to be to wipe the hard disk and replace the OS on a new machine.

Yes, and now that I give it more thought, it may have been more a me thing than an it thing. I was really hot on the AMD and ATI (was that a thing?) back in the day. Not so much now. Anyway, if memory serves, there was a real disconnect back then with the ATI graphics drivers (lots of warnings from MS about the driver not being signed by MS or not designed for the hardware, even though ATI/AMD could verify it was authentic) and the OS. So that was in most cases an issue.

The rest of the failures were hard file failures, and in most cases, a SFC scan would put the system right, or not. (SFC scan, bad system files, repaired, reboot, scan again, still bad files, re-install the OS then finally stable). I can't explain it any better than that. Was a motivating factor in exploring other OS replacements (MX). I do have to say the issues were never terminal or machine-bricking. And in one case it was a bad cable (ISA) to the hard drive (One pin!) Ouch. That one took 3 days to figure out!

[needmorebrains]

We are all having a great discussion, and I just wanted to thank everyone for their honest inputs. It does lend perspective to the original question. We are a real talented bunch here, each of us in our own way!

[Arnox]

Sorry for the really late response. Got super busy IRL and couldn't answer at the time.

I have no idea where you're getting that idea. Upgrading Windows has been a storied event in PC ownership since the days of Windows 1.0. Even when moving from one version of Windows to another, it could sometimes go sideways. The need to change the OS from the one the PC had the day you bought it was, as it still is today, predicated by the promise of better performance, support, and new features that the company can't or won't backport.

I'm not saying that people didn't upgrade. Of course they did. But they weren't forced to upgrade due to security concerns. (Or at very least, due to MANY security concerns.) This meant an old PC with an old OS could be used in enterprise for much longer as long as the hardware and software didn't suddenly break.

The same will apply for Windows 11. People won't change the OS because they don't NEED to, unless they don't like its invasive features. In many cases, they won't have much choice, as Linux cannot readily support all hardware or run the programs that Windows can out of the box.

Linux may not support every single piece of hardware in the world, but Linux still covers a LOT of hardware, and just about everything most consumers and even enterprises will care about. Furthermore, I've had seen many instances where Linux driver support was actually even BETTER than on Windows. But putting all that aside, the case for Linux adoption is quite strong. As more and more viable software for Linux pops up, people will have more and more incentive to switch over.

The Toughbook graphics driver was proprietary and, after some research, the one company who had a Linux driver for Toughbooks was very princess-and-the-pea about it. Their Linux driver was closed-source and invitation only. We asked about licensing it from them. They asked why. We said we were interested in customizing a Linux distro for a Toughbook for limited usage and testing, which was true.

They wrote back something like "Hmmmm, sounds suspicious. Thanks but no thanks."

I hope that Toughbooks have an open source graphics driver by now.

Holy hell...

Never buying a Toughbook now until I see this resolved. That is unacceptable.

[DukeComposed]

Sorry for the really late response. Got super busy IRL and couldn't answer at the time.

I have no idea where you're getting that idea. Upgrading Windows has been a storied event in PC ownership since the days of Windows 1.0. Even when moving from one version of Windows to another, it could sometimes go sideways. The need to change the OS from the one the PC had the day you bought it was, as it still is today, predicated by the promise of better performance, support, and new features that the company can't or won't backport.

I'm not saying that people didn't upgrade. Of course they did. But they weren't forced to upgrade due to security concerns. (Or at very least, due to MANY security concerns.) This meant an old PC with an old OS could be used in enterprise for much longer as long as the hardware and software didn't suddenly break.

People were forced to upgrade as security updates were discontinued for old versions of the software. I don't know how you measure "MANY security concerns" but even one month without a Microsoft security update can be catastrophic. Companies with enterprise deployments almost entirely insist on current security patches, not the other way around. Old PCs with an old OS are vulnerable to who knows what, unless you pay enough to receive an extended support contract, as some companies and governments do.

What you're describing isn't enterprise longevity, it's corporate malfeasance.

[Arnox]

People were forced to upgrade as security updates were discontinued for old versions of the software. I don't know how you measure "MANY security concerns" but even one month without a Microsoft security update can be catastrophic. Companies with enterprise deployments almost entirely insist on current security patches, not the other way around. Old PCs with an old OS are vulnerable to who knows what, unless you pay enough to receive an extended support contract, as some companies and governments do.

What you're describing isn't enterprise longevity, it's corporate malfeasance.

What? I'm not talking about anything past like, say, 2001. The public internet was definitely gaining steam in the 90s, but it wasn't entirely the norm yet, and totally offline systems and networks were a very common thing still. That's why back then, you weren't forced nearly as much to upgrade, even on the enterprise level.

[AK-47]

I'm not saying that people didn't upgrade. Of course they did. But they weren't forced to upgrade due to security concerns. (Or at very least, due to MANY security concerns.) This meant an old PC with an old OS could be used in enterprise for much longer as long as the hardware and software didn't suddenly break.

Pretty much every single time an older version of Windows goes end-of-life, there are security concerns for remaining on the older version of Windows which will no longer receive security updates. Same goes for MacOS, Linux, and any other OS you can think of. This is more of an angle in corporate sectors where liability is an important thing to establish in the case of a breach.

Linux may not support every single piece of hardware in the world, but Linux still covers a LOT of hardware, and just about everything most consumers and even enterprises will care about. Furthermore, I've had seen many instances where Linux driver support was actually even BETTER than on Windows. But putting all that aside, the case for Linux adoption is quite strong. As more and more viable software for Linux pops up, people will have more and more incentive to switch over.

The only time I have seen Linux support hardware better than Windows, is an old 25 year old webcam that no longer runs on recent versions of Windows. Other than that, the plague of obsoleting hardware is now affecting Linux too, serves them right for stuffing all the device drivers in the kernel and not having an easy way to load modules from elsewhere.
About applications, very few want to port an app to Linux without specifying an exact distro and version due to the absolute disregard for backwards compatibility. You could argue whether such disregard is a good or bad thing, but reality is, it puts application developers off.

Holy hell...

Never buying a Toughbook now until I see this resolved. That is unacceptable.

I have some CF-19, CF-30, CF-31 Toughbooks and Linux is OK, though the CF-31 Linux starts the audio device muted (fixed by alsaunmute on Fedora). Graphics are Intel HD graphics. I'm not sure what model @DukeComposed attempted to use so I can't comment on that, nor can I comment on the ones that are kitted with the optional second GPU (which I believe is an AMD or NVIDIA one in most cases).

I have yet to try the new FZ-40 toughbook, I am still fishing around to see if any secure boot stuff would cause issues before investing anything into it.