Laptop compatability - UM5606KA

This will happen on every Linux distro if you’re having these issues on arch, assuming the issue isn’t configuration. FWIW, the amdgpu drivers are currently very broken, there are patches floating around that fix them: Lockups with kernel 6.14.7 and AMD GPUs

The other big name distros are usually on much older kernels, so won’t have support for this device’s hardware quirks to begin with, while other distros will match Arch’s kernel, so you’ll have the exact same issues.

In Linux land all (-most all) drivers are ultimately part of the kernel, and since all Linux distros ship Linux, there’s no escaping driver issues if hardware vendors don’t support it properly or FOSS folks haven’t caught up yet (exception are third party kernel modules, like the nvidia driver, but those are usually even more painful to use than bad first party code).

With the exception of Windows (and depending on the age of the hardware, it’s often worse on Windows, too), support for other OSes tends to be even worse, so you don’t really have other options but not buying computers from vendors who don’t properly support their hardware. Sucks that that’s so hard to determine ahead of time, and that consumer hardware vendors are almost all awful at this.

If you don’t want to track down the problems yourself, you’ll probably have to wait a few months/years for kernel development to catch up.

That said, as far as running on quirky hardware goes, IMO NixOS is probably the best distro out there for this kind of thing, since it’s the only one where you have a fighting chance of keeping all your hacks and workarounds documented. Applying all the patches you likely need without losing the ability to update is also much easier.

Still takes a good amount of effort and/or software dev experience, though, plus now you have to learn how to utilize NixOS effectively while doing the exact kind of thing that has endless “guides” luring newbies into footguns.


With all that context out of the way, nixos-hardware is indeed your best bet for finding existing configuration for your system.

nixos-facter aims to replace that with a more general-purpose hardware database in the future, so you don’t need someone with the exact same hardware (often many components are shared with other vendors), but it’s not ready for naïve use yet.