My laptop is arriving on Monday and I haven’t picked a distro yet. I currently use Debian but that is on older hardware. I’m experienced with a lot of distros so I’m a bit flexible here. I was thinking openSUSE for the sake of the latest and greatest AMD drivers, but I do see that Fedora is officially supported while openSUSE is not. Are there any hardware compatibility issues I could expect?
I wouldn’t expect hardware compatibility issues on distros they haven’t approved, otherwise they would be approved.
I dont think this is the case: supported distro means that every problem is a priority bug for them.
It is very resource consuming to maintain support for a distro, they need to actively fix these bug, provide official guide, and official support. This is why they only support two distros, not because all the other distros are guaranteed to have hardware problems.
And unsupported means bugs are not a priority and there is no guides or support. Sounds kinda like what I was saying.
But with Linux that… isn’t how it works. If there are bugs with the AMD platform, those patches go back to AMD who includes it in their drivers that they publish in the Linux kernel. A guide to get something working on Fedora will generally work on Arch or openSUSE or Debian. Heck, I use the arch wiki all the time when using Debian and openSUSE…
Then it comes back to my intial question: why are there “approved” distros at all?
If you file a support ticket their support team will help you. As I understand it that’s about it.