When I was buying my laptop some years ago, I wished I knew of a website with a database of hardware that works well with free software. Specially with any operating system based on Linux, so I wouldn’t get into too much trouble to get everything working. Instead I ended up purchasing a machine that came with Windows and a bunch of hardware that depended on proprietary drivers to work well. It took ages to get every feature to work as it should on my chosen distribution.
Recently I discovered h-node, a website created by the free software foundation (FSF) together with Debain GNU/Linux which tries to:
… aim at the construction of a hardware database in order to identify what devices work with a fully free operating system.
Since not everyone uses Windows or Mac OSX, I hope this might be helpful to those reading this blog. As for me, next time I need to buy something I already know where to start my research.
