I am looking for producttion level Distro for my HP Notebook 15-ac029nm. I tested it on Debian 9, and maneged to get it working after some fiddling with wi-fi.

I want to give CentOS 7 a try, or some other .rpm distro like OpenSuse. I need information on support of hardware, wi-fi in particular.

I want to turn this into a stable, business style office notebook, so no games will be run on it. As for graphics drivers, support for discrete Radeon card is optional.
Of coure, it should be able to play HD videos. I can't live without my favourite series and movies, after all

Welcome to the Forum!

If that computer will run Debian, then it will run CentOS.

If you don't want games, then the integrated graphics should suffice (and save power!) But you can get a driver, even specifically for CentOS:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/linux

CentOS comes with proprietary drivers, unlike Debian, so there may be less fiddling with wi-fi. This may be helpful:
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops

Thank you, CentOS it is.

Centos, Scientific and Oracle are quite similar clones of RH. A few others are based on RH.

You can also get OpenSuse and Suse to use, see SuseStudio for ways to build custom if you wish. HP offers some systems with Suse so there may be some testing at factory but I doubt a laptop would be tested on Suse.

At this point you may wish to try either of the above types. Some folks would call Ubuntu a server OS also and it is well regarded.

Have you considered FreeBSD?

Stable as it gets, business ready as in The Power to Serve. There are some games in the ports tree but not as many as Steam. The box I'm on now has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 and will play 1080p videos without a stutter. Sound output for .ogg files is great, too.

If you're worried about being able to set it up I have a tutorial on how to build a FreeBSD desktop from scratch on my site.

Maybe a higher learning curve than Linux, but who doesn't want to be a neckbeard?

@jefro: I have heard HP has some configs for SUSE, but I need the stability (as in not upgrading often). SUSE has it, OpenSUSE has not. But SUSE is not free.

@Trihexagonal: Actually, I have considered it. But then I have larned hardware compatibility (driver choice) is not the greatest as of yet, and there is a steep learning curve. Nevertheless, it looks like a professional distro choice.

My choice would be CentOS 7. Sadly, I'm in no position to buy SUSE. It is really tempting. Maybe some other time.

I've ran it on 3 Thinkpads, a Sony Vaio, the Gateway/Acer clone I'm on now, an older Gateway Solo 1450, and 2 Dell towers. I'm not sure what driver issues you might encounter but I've encountered none in my experience.

My $.02

I would go CentOS. The broadwell architecture is old enough that you shouldn't have to fight TOO hard to get everything working. As you discovered already, that broadcom wireless is going to be the thing you have to fight with most. the WL driver can be built on CentOS 7, so you should be able to get it working.

That all said, if you really wanted to go BSD, it SHOULD work about as well as linux on that hardware (with the possible exception of the Broadcom wireless). The advantage of buying a couple generation old chipsets/cpu's is that the linux & bsd kernels have had the chance to get them working well.

But yeah, I prefer CentOS to *BSD for an Enterprise-level OS.

The BSD's a good choices too.
Centos is a good distro. I use it.

I have just tried CentOS 7 live GNOME. As I have feared, graphics don't display correctly on Firefox. Can't see anything while browsing. Kernel 3.10 stack is too old for my Broadwell card.

That means OpenSUSE is my best bet if I want an RPM distro. Fedora works also, but it's too bleeding edge. Thank you all for your advice.

CentOS does support Broadwell graphics
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Lates...s-477249.shtml
The fact that you have a Gnome desktop is proof of that, since Gnome will complain if it can't get hardware graphics acceleration. Obviously there's some problem with Firefox. If you launch Firefox from the command line in the terminal emulator, does it leave any error messages? Sometimes a live session has problems that the installed version doesn't.

You can grab wifi drivers and firmware from github. And compile from source and stuff. I'd be more worried about the GPU drivers. My new hp laptop ba053nr needs the amdgpu stuff that works in debian stretch or newer. Although the framebuffer works fine in jessie, just not as fast for a machine that otherwise looks good on paper specs. I would avoid the BSDs if you're already worried about hardware support.

Firefox does not show any errors. I have tried downloading Chrome using Terminal and it installed:
https://www.tecmint.com/install-goog...-fedora-linux/

Problem is I can't open it. It complains about read-only live user and whatnot. I've taken a liking to this distro and it would be cool if I can make it a Windows relacement. Sadly, I need browser on it (who doesn't?).

EDIT: Nautilus can't mount my Windows partitions, too. Complains about not being able to mount "ntfs". From what I know, you need some package to mount ntfs filesystems, but does CentOS have them? I tried searching for ntfs on software, nothing comes up.

Almost every distro for the last 15 years has been able to mount and read ntfs. Almost every one for the last 5 years has included ntfs-3g.

https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/mount-ntfs-centos/ this should still be usable.

If you are running the CentOS live, then there are going to be problems adding software. To install software in Linux you need to be the administrator, so you'd first have to give the command "su" and your root password. Since you haven't installed CentOS yet, you're stuck with just being an ordinary user. A check at a CentOS mailing list shows that Chrome will install and run in CentOS 7.

The fact that you can boot the live session with a GUI shows that CentOS does work on that computer. You just need to pluck up courage and install! Once you've got used to what's installed, you can get anything else you need. Before doing that, read
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories