Not too long ago I installed Mint onto a laptop that turned out to have a network card by Broadcom, which doesn’t have Linux support, so that didn’t work. I’m going to upgrade my currently Windows PC to Mint at the end of Win10 support in October, and I want to be sure I don’t have any hardware that is incompatible with Linux. Which manufacturers are obstinate like that?
Also keep in mind that laptop wifi cards are usually easily replaceable, so if you end up with that being the only problem it’s usually cheap and easy to solve
this
these cards are about $ 5-12 and i pull them from junk laptops all the time
not the “easiest” thing to solve but well within the abilities of somebody who can build a PC
If you happen to have a nice enterprise laptop, you can usually access the card very easily. For example HP EliteBook laptops (which are sort of nice laptops, but with a bad keyboard) you won’t even need any tools to open the bottom lid. Lenovo ThinkPad laptops tend to require a screwdriver. Never actually swapped a wifi card on either of these, but I guess there could be one more screw holding the card in place. Definitely doable, and it won’t take too long.
Contrast that with HP Pavilion or Acer Aspire TrashBooks. Yes, I have opened a few of those, and I regret every minute of it. Normally, you need to disassemble the whole thing before you get to even see the parts you need to swap. It’s not quite as painful as opening Apple hardware, but it’s not far behind. Verdict: 2/10, would not recommend.
yeah word to the wise, avoid HP notebooks even if they have that fancy AMD APU you want, they are a nightmare