this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Is there a program or way to check what parts are covered by Linux? I have an old laptop I want to try Linux on beforehand.
For some hardware you might have to install drivers or firmware yourself. Not all are included in all Linux distributions for complex reason.
Btw you can check your laptop model in https://linux-hardware.org/
As another person had suggested, test with a live image first before installing it to an SSD/HDD, however Linux is very well maintained by the community and even if there arenβt native drivers from your hardwares manufacturer, for example Corsair Keyboard Drivers, there usually is Open Sourced alternatives for these things like CKB-Next.
I say this to everyone, once you get a grasp on BASH (Bourne Again Shell) and package managers & repositories (edit: and the filesystem structure) youβll essentially be able to use any Linux distro, it just comes down to the nitty gritty of things.
This is what I've definitely struggled the most with mint so far. It's extremely difficult to find anything and I've needed to manually search for the file paths multiple times already, since I always manage to do something I need them for, and I haven't gotten locate to work etc... Though this is probably just me being stoopid since I never find anything on windows either lmao
I'd say that downloading drivers from the manufacturer is the absolute outlier and things working better with integrated open source drivers out of the box is the norm.
Try before you ~~buy~~ download proprietary cruft.
Yes. In general - it's called live cd. Some distros ship with that in their installed image. {K,X,}ubuntu come to mind. Mint might do as well. You can boot into it and look around, see if basic stuff - network, audio, etc - works.
And you can do this with a USB, it doesn't need to be a CD/DVD.