Hi there.
Apologies in advance if this issue is already addressed somewhere in the
Debian universe.
Last night it occurred to me that my specific model of laptop, the
Samsung RF711-so7uk, has some hardware features that could use some
close attention.
Rather than plead to users, developers, Debian etc. to "do the job 100%"
I thought a more modest enquiry would be appropriate.
How much of the hardware in your machine is directly supported by
Debian? As a percentage like "supported/present" I don't know.
If there was a package that displayed it then I could try connecting
devices to see how that changed and pick the best one.
A crude metric for sure, but better than a compass.
What then about the "21st century" features: OpenGL, WebGL 1.0/2.0,
Wayland...?
The Debian version of google-chrome (Chromium) from Jessie supports
WebGL 1.0 whereas the direct-from-google version (google-chrome Version
56.0.2924.87 (64-bit)) doesn't support the installed hardware.
The installed hardware being (from lspci)
- VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core
Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
- 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 540M] (rev ff)
- Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless
Network Adapter (rev 01)
(from lsusb)
148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp.
I started using the Ralink/Mediatek usb wifi adapter after the Broadcom
one had problems.
And it took a download from Fedora for the firmware to work:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1264631
I realise that as a community-driven project, gauging how much of your
users hardware is supported is a niche topic.
Could Debian have an install option to be allowed to query the installed
hardware so it can build a database of hardware configurations Debian is
installed on, like popcon?
Then you would have metrics: how many machines, how many types of each
machine, how many instances of each device type, ...
You could then tag a bug report with your configuration hash(es) and
have a better chance that someone else using the same hardware would be
able to help.
Possibilities abound!
Regards,
Philip Ashmore
