I’m looking into buying a new system and I wonder which of all the mainboard manufacturers you recommend for Linux in general and gaming in particular? Which ones have the best Linux driver support and which ones publish open source drivers? Are AMD or Intel chipsets preferred?
Also general best bang for the buck recommendations are appreciated!
And yes, I have googled this and I have some ideas, but I’m interested in what my fellow Lemmies think. And I also want this information to be here on Lemmy instead of Reddit or AI generated blogs. If you feel offended by this, you’re totally free to not reply and also down vote this post.
It’s not so much about motherboard brand as it is about the chips used on any given model. For example, ASUS makes some boards with Intel i225-v ethernet, and others with Realtek RTL822x ethernet. The Intel chip is notorious for stability problems on all platforms, and although I think the linux drivers eventually managed to work around them, the boards with the Realtek chip avoided those problems entirely.
With that in mind, I suggest you look at a few key chips used on any board you’re considering, and search linux forums for problem reports with their model numbers. In particular:
- Ethernet
- Wi-Fi
- Audio
Sometimes you can find comparison charts for such things, like this one for socket AM5 boards
Also, it’s nice to have a board that can update its own BIOS from a flash drive, rather than requiring a Windows program to do it.
Use https://linux-hardware.org/ to check stuff. Ask questions with the links if you do not understand the reports. Everything you can build with has a proprietary bootloader, even the System76 stuff is proprietary.
Nice website! Thanks!
Don’t know about the drivers part.
But I was just looking into motherboards a bit, and it looks like the Asrock x870E Nova is a great bang for the buck.
Asrock in general seems to be overall better than the rest these days.Yup. I got an x370 board from them when Ryzen first launched, and they were one of the first to support the 5000 series CPUs, and I was able to upgrade to a 5600. I ended up moving it to be my NAS, and it’s running my old 1700.
I’ve had no problems with that board, and I ended up getting another ASRock for myself and the only issue was the WiFi, which I replaced and I’m golden again.
When looking for motherboards, they’re my first choice now.
Check for WiFi and Bluetooth drivers compatibility first. Every x86_64 motherboard should work with Linux well, as in, it will boot and all USB/PCI Express/SATA ports will work. What you should care are peripherals soldered onto the motherboard, like WiFi, Bluetooth, extra Ethernet ports, ten years ago I would say soundcards but nowadays all integrated soundcards are supported, some motherboards have strange ports like Firewire which might not be supported, integrated videocards are now soldered directly onto CPU and not on motherboards like before so HDMI ports should all work on any motherboard.
And yes, as the other commenter said, check that firmware update does not require some Windows program, and could be done only with USB drive and selecting some option in the BIOS/UEFI menu.
In many motherboards, WiFi isn’t soldered on, it’s a mini-PCIe card wrapped up in a metal tin. I replaced mine on my ASRock b550 itx board, and it only took a few minutes.
There don’t seem to be many guides out there for it, so if that’s something you may want to do, check it before you put everything together.
Good advice, but if you’re buying a new motherboard, why would you care for replacing it’s components? Choose the one that works properly out of the box.
Then we should all buy prebuilts then, right?
I didn’t buy my motherboard expecting to replace the WiFi, I only replaced it after failing to get it working properly. It’s apparently a common issue with this chip (and I have the same chip in another machine without the issue), which is a shame because Intel usually does well on their hardware and drivers. But $20 and 15 min or so of effort fixed an otherwise fantastic motherboard.
I’m interested in small form factors, and there aren’t a ton of options in mini-ITX, especially for new launches. So I look for the things that really matter, and compromise on the things I can either service myself or outside work around. WiFi is one of those things.
Ah, faulty hardware.
I got more open to prebuilt PCs when I could not upgrade any single component of my home PC, the motherboard still had AGP slot. It is also an option when you are buying a PC-in-a-monitor build, upgrading anything there is a fool’s errand. But for regular PCs it was considerably cheaper ten years ago to buy every component separately, and then they just click in place like LEGOs. The chances of burning your custom-built PC are like, you need serious crab hands to mount it that poorly.
I am not sure what makes a motherboard Linux-friendly… I guess fwupd integration with LVFS would be nice? Still, I am happy with my MSI B650 Tomahawk, since I can just put the latest firmware into an exFAT formatted thumb drive and update with it. All my laptops in the past had only supported firmware updates with Windows-only executables. I think I really should check out Framework for my next laptop.
Having to use windows when upgrading firmware is very Linux unfriendly.
In this regard, I think Gigabyte just has you put the firmware in some accessible location (like on a USB drive) and update from BIOS?
Every (non-laptop) motherboard I’ve ever had (Gigabyte, MSI, Asus) has that functionality
My mobo (asrock) does this as well, I just assumed it was the default for all of them
Well, for example, my MOBOs Ethernet requires the Realtek out of tree drivers (at least it still did on 6.11), which don’t always compile on the current kernel. Ironically, the WiFi works fine.
That’s unfortunate. I got lucky with MSI.
Msi pro b650-s wifi also works great but my previous asus board was bad on all oses
Only potential issues I can forsee are audio driver and networking driver, but I highly doubt either of those will be an issue with any modern motherboard.
I would just buy whatever and install Linux on it. As for which one to buy, just get one from a reputable brand (Gigabyte, ASUS, ASRock, MSI, and whatever else I’m missing).
The CPU and the BIOS/UEFI/other primary bootloader are all that really matter from a software freedom perspective (hardware freedom is a different beast altogether that still has no truly viable solution for 100% freedom from head to toe yet), and unless you go with an old mobo supported by libreboot or canoeboot, then you’re going to have to deal with having Intel ME or AMD PSP, which are segmented processors inside of the CPU that has full memory access and runs proprietary code along with having a proprietary BIOS.
Yeah, I’m only interested in the “least bad” here. Taking usability, libre and performance into account. I don’t think that even the Framework Laptop 13 RISC-V will be completely libre.
Thanks for input though!
is gigabyte a reputable brand tho? i have never had a good gigabyte product, and i have never heard of one either when my friends have owned them. recently made the mistake of buying a gb mobo and it’s such a piece of shit 😅 and i only have myself to blame, all for saving 20€…
I only buy Gigabyte mobos personally.
I’ve had good luck with Gigabyte, but I’ve always considered them an “Intel” brand - as in their Intel offerings are decent but there are better choices if building an AMD system.
My Gigabyte monitor is doing okay.
Interesting, I’ve had 3 Gigabyte MOBOs and GPUs. One GPU died after 6 years, which is unfortunate, but seems reasonable. First MOBO is still going strong 10 years later. Have had no issues otherwise.
odd. maybe they ship worse products to smaller countries or something. i also have a gigabyte gpu and it has been a nightmare since day 1, i regret not returning it. suspected bios problems in both gpu and mobo. i have also seen three different instances of quality issues when my friends have bought gigabyte mobos. DOA, one died within a year, one had loose RAM slots and retailer wouldn’t replace it under warranty…
Uhh someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the motherboard cares what os you use nor does it much (if any) impact on gaming performance. In fact, the only “Linux compatible” piece of hardware I would suggest is an amd GPU, although even that isn’t really necessary anymore as several distros (PopOS, Nobara, and bazzite off the top of my head, probably more) have isos that come bundled with Nvidia drivers
There are certainly considerations here:
- Ethernet - Intel tends to have fantastic Linux support, so I highly recommend Intel NICs
- WiFi - often user replaceable (I upgraded my Intel WiFi on my b550 ITX mobo because it was faulty), so feel free to roll the dice
- audio - less of an issue these days, but still worth checking
And Nvidia drivers aren’t hard to install on pretty much any distro, the problem is that they’re not FOSS, so you could have issues with kernel compatibility (esp on rolling distros) and Wayland (largely seems solved?).
Actually, it is not true from what I’ve learned. For example, Intel is about to push chipset/bios upgrades to boost the performance of the new Core Ultra 9 285k. And that kind of driver can at best be open source and in the upstream kernel or at worst closed source and only installed by some windows only bloatware.
