Hello everyone, do you know a linux friendly motherboard or a website where I can check?
I'm trying to build a new pc just for Linux, in my main pc I have a Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P that gave me so much problems to the point that I gave up on using Linux on that.

More infos: In future I plan to buy an Nvidia video card with CUDA support for machine learning.

I'm sorry for my english, greetings

what you posted (GA-970A-UD3P) should work (in general). Also almost every motherboard should work, just the fresh new ones may cause headache (if there was no driver available).

Thanks for your answer, with new updates it doesn't work anymore. But even before I had to do some stuff to make it work (enable IOMMU and SVM) and at boot I had to add the line "amd_iommu=on iommu=pt". I would like to buy something that doesn't give me this kind of problems

I just upgraded my main system to a Gigabyte board, it is working very well. I kept the drives and linux systems from my old Gigabyte MB install. I had a few minor problems, I have since ironed them out. My ethernet card was named eth1 instead of eth0, fix with a udev rule; v-box on my current system was fixed by installing a new version from v-box.

Here is the board info from inxi.

Your MB is a little older than mine. I have read you need a later kernel, so this may be the source of what ever problems you have encountered. I'm running 5.4.17 on a Slackware64 current system. I also have Slackware64 14.2 stable running 4.4.208 on the same hardware.
Both work well after fixing the problems I noted.

Do you want to go AMD or Intel on your next build? Googling your board revealed many reported problems like you mentioned. I'm not an AMD guy but I've never experienced those kind of problems with Intel boards; they usually just work provided you have a recent enough kernel for the newest Intel board. Get a good Intel Asus board; Gigabyte is my second choice. You just have to Google to see if there are any ongoing issues with a given board. If you want to go AMD, wait for someone with experience on AMD's recent hardware to give you pertinent advice.

I've just bought a new desktop with a Gigabyte GA-A320M-S2H and an AMD A6-9500 — no separate graphics card — and everything worked. I think it would be very odd these days to buy something that didn't. Some people seem to have compatibility problems with a Gigabyte and Nvidia, even with Windows, solved with IOMMU.

I would recommend Gigabyte B450 AORUS ELITE which I am currently using with a Ryzen 2700X runing MX Linux 19 that replaced 2 MSI motherboards in less than a moth that failed and 1 ASUS that failed in 11 months. What ever you do I recommend staying away from ASUS because their quality has dropped like a rock. MSI is even worse. I know this from my own experience. What Linux distro you are having trouble getting the motherboard to work on?

Running an MSI z240 "Pro" with zero issues on any Linux distro I have tried, and I have tried a large number of them. Currently running FreeBSD on this board with zero issues. I am 100% Intel though, I haven't used an AMD processor since the K5. My board is a few years old (3?) but works just fine.

Do you have the latest firmware (BIOS) installed for the board? Many of the Iommu problems were due to early firmware revisions not properly enumerating the hardware to the kernel, and most major manufacturers fixed these issues with later firmware updates.

Thank you all for your answers, I should post more in this forum, it has a very nice helping community but I'm kind of ashamed of my english, so sorry again for the mistakes, I'm trying to do my best


I had new problems when I updated the system, maybe it has something to do with IOMMUv2 that my PC doesn't support, I don't know.
Last time I tried to install Linux Arch it frezes after the reboot, I don't even get to the point of login, so the only way I can try again its by formatting and reinstall.

I actually have another pc in my home which is a Ryzen 5 2400G with Gigabyte GA-AX370M-Gaming 3, I was thinking to try it but even if it works its not my pc and I would have to buy a clone of it, I'm not really thrilled about buying a clone


In the last years I have been using only AMD (graphics cards and CPU) but I always had some problem here and there and some lack of features, nothing major but maybe its time to go back to intel and nvidia and see how it goes.


My first experience with Linux was with the Gigabyte I specified in the first post, I have plenty of patience for these kind of things but that motherboard traumatized me, I lost literally days just to make it work and when I finally thought I had won, it came back for round 2. I was probably just unlucky with that one but I'm legit scared.

I was very new about Linux stuff and my friend suggest me to try debian distros (ubuntu, mint), I tried Fedora too, and another one I don't remember the name, with all of them just after the login, I couldn't use devices (keyboard, mouse, network and so on), then I kind of found my way with Arch who gave me more control during the installation. Now even with Arch, just after the installation it frezes before I can get to the login and that's a big problem because to try new methods I have to reinstall everything.
Just lately I have found archfi.sf.net/archfi, this could make things faster, I'm tempted to try again but I know I will screw up the dual boot eventually

Interesting, you think gigabyte is one of the most reliable right now?
I was thinking about buying an Asus because in last months I have build a pc with relatively old components I had, It has an Asus P5NE-SLI motherboard, CPU Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600, and a gtx 560 ti, everything was smooth, I finally was enjoying Linux without a single problem, and by the way I'm actually reading the book "The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk" because I want to ditch windows forever, my dream is going Linux full time and use Windows just for gaming, but the graphics card broked and the motherboard is half broken already so I'm not gonna fix it.

MSI was another one I was thinking for. My first Pc was Intel, I think its time to go back to origins also just to change

I think the update of the firmware it's actually the best option but I don't have the courage to do it with just one pc available

I believe that because I have always used ASUS motherboards and had excellent results until the last one. All my previous computer builds I used ASUS motherboards which it's quality was top of the line back then. Pentium 3-800, Pentium 4- 1,4Ghz, i7 3.0 Ghz, The ASUS motherboard that failed was running a Ryzen 7 1700, I have now upgraded to a Ryzen 7 2700X on the Gigabyte motherboard. ASUS quality is not what it once was. I wouldn't recommend ASUS unless you are looking for problems and unreliability.

Regarding IOMMU, you should disable it if you don't use it. It actually even adds small overhead to I/O.

Thanks, I still had it enabled