Well I’ve been looking for a linux distro to use as the only OS and find that waiting for opensuse 12.1 to come seems to suit my needs best.
Here are some of the concerns I have about the hardware I own and Linux. I’ve tried to find info on the topics and there is quite a bit, but first of all it’s kind of oldish and it’s scattered everywhere. Most of the questions probably aren’t opensuse specific but need answers.
I use a Asrock p67 Fatal1ty Pro motherboard. Will the USB 3 ports work. These ones are powered by an Etron chip and I’ve read about some problems. Is this been addressed in the newest kernel? The other thing of course is the UEFI “thing”. I really don’t know anything about this - just that grub isn’t doing very well - especially grub 2 with some bugs. Can someone explain to me the whole issue? I’ll really appreciate it. I’ve seen the new “UEFI bioses” and the new GPT discs talked as they are the same thing which confuses me more. I know it can be made to work, but will it work “out of the box” with opensuse? What will be the steps needed if not? All the new hardware(motherboards) is moving in this direction for one reason or another.
The other thing is the ssd support as a whole in linux. I own an intel 510 ssd. This is actually a lot more clear to me but I still maybe need some clarifications. I think of using ext4 and do nothing but mount with discard option. I’ve seen moving some directories off the ssd as a tweak but don’t really know what to think about it. Does linux generally writes more on the drive than a typical windows 7 and hence the tweaks? Or is it just everyone being too conservative on the write capacity of the new ssds? Using the noatime option seem high on the list of suggestions too. How much writes does this actually prevents? The other thing I remember reading somewhere is the way the ssds handle trim commands is optimized for only NTFS? Should I consider this being true?
I’ll probably come with a few more questions later.