Hi!
I was wondering (out of curiosity) what the most Linux-friendly and Linux-unfriendly hardware manufacturers are? I'm thinking mostly just computers, but feel free to throw in companies that make printers, scanners, cameras, or whatever.

My hope is that the next time someone wants to buy a new computer, they see this and give business to the "good guys." (and, in the process, boycott the "bad guys")

I'd say the number 1 unfriendly manufacturer is Lexmark. They also also number 1 at making the most horrible printers. I haven't been able to print more than 2-3 pages without it jamming, not matter the OS. They can also fry USB ports. Avoid them like the plague.

I would say HP and Brother are the most friendly printer manufacturers.

Genius mice tend to be unfriendly.

Logitech and A4Tech tend to be friendly.

I can't think of any other hardware that is particularly friendly or unfriendly.

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Hi,

hp is is pretty good for printers and/or scanners. Install hplip from your distros repository and away you go.

Evo2.

Silicon Image. Basically any vendor claiming to combine ease of use and cost-effectiveness by doing stuff aided by software that should have been done in hardware alone. For the general idea also see "winmodem".

Brother printers have always worked well for me with Linux, as have nVidia based graphics cards.

For the most part, though, I've not had many problems with any hardware under Linux. Of course, I do some online researching before buying any hardware just to make sure it's not totally incompatible with Linux.

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Graphics cards in general are highly variable. I personally have had a lot of issues with the nvidia blob. I currently prefer onboard Intel graphics, not a lot of power, but stable and useful. Newer cards tend to have more issues, because the drivers devs can't catch up.

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A number of big companies offer linux in their server lines but also on some business desktops and workstations. They tend to have fully working Suse/RH hardware and will warrant it.

I'm really not trying to hijack the thread but rather add to it, here, by voicing an opposite view. I have had only the rarest of problems with nVidia and that includes some hardware that was so far off reference that it was flaky in Windows, too. Example - I bought an XFX 6600 GT AGP card years ago that would not run in Windows with anything but the driver from XFX. It worked just fine in Linux.

The only issues I've had are with a few older cards with certain kernels. I had to play a cat and mouse game getting the right combination of nVidia drivers and Linux kernels in a few cases. Once installed, all good.

Newer cards, especially top brand names like EVGA, Asus, and Gigabyte, have worked flawlessly and effortlessly. My current Gigabyte card I bought less than one month after the series came out and it has been fantastic on 5 distros, and several major upgrades. Batting 1000 so far. Zero problems.

In general, I may give nVidia extra slack out of respect for the fact that they have supported so many alternate operating systems since the mid 1990's, but that does not mean a free pass. If there are problems, it would seem they would want to know about them. They did "man up" after Linus gave them the One Finger Salute recently. Intel and ATi are trying and getting better but they have a ways to go to catch up, IMHO.

Edit: On another front, Networking, afaik, Broadcom is still flaky.

Had problems with Dell several years ago requiring optical media disks for OS installation to have a BIOS boot ROM code on them, or the system would not accept the OS installation disk at all.

For computer hardware, I find the more "server/business-oriented" it is, the better compatibility it has with Linux. Server motherboards (Supermicro et al), workstation graphics cards, business laptops, etc. all typically work flawlessly with any distro. Where you run into problems is usually with the bleeding edge "consumer" hardware...that stuff changes so rapidly and is often thrown out into the world more or less untested. It's the old "let the consumers be our beta testers" mentality, and you'll quite often find that only a few, if any distros support the graphics or sound card being used, etc. You'll sometimes even have problems on Windows with that hardware too, as bug-free drivers are still being developed.

Businesses can't afford to deal with that crap, so the products that are aimed at the business market typically use slightly older, more stable, better designed, and better supported internals. Of course you do pay a bit more for it though.

Same goes for printers, networking devices, etc.