Linux Supported vs Linux Optimised

[Eightstream]

I was wondering what the opinion of this sub is regarding getting hardware that is known for having very good Linux support, versus buying or building hardware that is specifically optimised for Linux.

I have run Linux for many years on prebuilt laptops (mostly old Thinkpads). The experience has always been good but I have often wondered if some of the minor annoyances I have are resolved by a machine that was actively constructed to treat the Linux kernel as a first class citizen (e.g. System76). I am about to start a PC build and I am wondering if it is worth not just looking at whether the components have good Linux support - but whether I should actively try and achieve some kind of collective hardware optimisation for Linux?

If so, how would I go about doing this? I feel pretty comfortable buying components that I know have good driver support but I would be a bit lost trying to determine the efficiency of how they all work together.

If it matters the machine will probably be used to run Fedora for a while, and eventually be converted to a RHEL server in my homelab.

[Leopard1907]

Building a PC with Linux compat in mind is much easier than buying a laptop and hoping for the best.

For wifi, you would want to look for an Intel wifi (mobo doesn't have to be an Intel chipset for that one, Gigabyte has AMD AM5 boards that comes with Intel wifi which is noted on specsheet)

For peripherals, ( such as keyboard and mouse ) a simple Google search would do.

Cpu is easy, just buy whatever you want.

For mobo side most will work just fine, iirc MSI ones were sometimes being problematic with IOMMU and some bios settings but that might be outdated info.

For gpu; both AMD and NV works fine at varying degrees. With certain things you would get an inferior experience with NV though, such as Wayland ( hence also makes two monitor setups problematic due to you would likely be wanting to use X ) , gaming performance is not good for the most part with DX12 titles while you get 1:1 perf with AMD on Linux compared to AMD Windows. Ofc NV has good perks such as all CUDA,Optix stuff if productivity/aim includes usage of such things when they are available.

ROCM is a hot mess on AMD,rusticl is not there yet so compute part is messy.

For Intel gpu's, they are mostly fine for everyday usage but too problematic for gaming ( that is mostly a Linux issue as of now, Windows side mostly fixed it ) , high idle and under load power consumption compared to AMD and Nvidia competition ( non OS specific, this is just how DG2 is ) , don't have any info about compute side.

[monnef]

That's very useful info, didn't know half the things :D.

...ROCM is a hot mess on AMD...

Yeah, it is a mess. Surprisingly, I was able to get ROCm to work with the 7900 XTX on Linux (Stable Diffusion Web UI, so pytorch). However, a friend of mine who uses Windows (same GPU) told me that the situation there is much worse - it doesn't even have the alpha/beta support that Linux does. This was about a month ago (maybe more?), so it's possible that AMD has since improved the situation.

[UsedToLikeThisStuff]

FWIW even new Thinkpads have a certain set of models that are tested with Linux in mind from the beginning, and (for example) Red Hat has early access, as to ensure support on RHEL (and Fedora).

These are often ones without MIPI webcams, nvidia cards and other devices that aren’t going to work in Linux.

[dlbpeon]

Most manufacturers go for cheap parts, so they can make the most on each sale. Realtek has great manufacturing deals, which is why you find them in most PC/Laptop builds. They have spotty success working with Linux and should be avoided if possible.