You often hear that hardware support is not good enough on Linux systems. The latest data from the Linux-Hardware.org portal suggests otherwise.

How to estimate state of hardware support in the operating system? It would seem that this is simply the ratio of the number of supported devices to the total number of devices on the market. But it's not that simple. First, both quantities are not even approximately known. Secondly, not all devices are equally popular. There are widely used devices, the support of which is necessary and there are rare ones. In addition, new device models appear in the world every day as well as new drivers in the operating system, so any assessment quickly becomes outdated.

The popularity of devices on users' computers was assessed using the Linux-Hardware.org project, which has accumulated a fairly large user base over 5 years of its existence. A new repository was created specifically for the study, which presents the population of PCI devices on users' computers. Thus, we now know which devices are more important and require better support. Device support status in the latest Linux kernel can be obtained from the LKDDb project.

Left a little — to sum up all instances of supported devices and divide by the total number of supported and unsupported ones, and repeat all this for different categories of devices. We've published the results in the repository. The average support level for all categories (Ethernet, WiFi, graphics card, sound, etc.) is currently about 99.3%, and this is the lower bound.

Thank you all for your attention. Please add probes of any of your computers to the database — this will help a lot with finding Linux-compatible configurations!