Sorry, I was not trying to put words in your mouth. I just usually hear, “Linux not good for me because it doesn’t support my setup well enough” when it should be “Linux not good for me because the manufacturers of my hardware don’t support Linux well enough”. Trying to put blame where it belongs in hopes of raising awareness to both users and manufacturers.

I also mistakenly thought you mentioned a newer Nvidia card when you are considering AMD. 🤦‍♂️ Good luck in your computing future!

It’s not the fault of the creators of an operating system that Nvidia refuses to write comparable drivers. Nvidia are the only ones with the technical knowledge of the GPU’s internals that is necessary to write the 100% functional driver. Open-source Nouveau drivers exist but are less functional because of this, its programmers have to try to reverse-engineer and do a lot of guesswork and testing, and for free.

Basically: If you value FOSS software at all, buy from manufacturers that are friendlier to FOSS software, or you may unknowingly lock yourself out of it.

Edit: Buying newer (especially of Nvidia) is probably a bad idea if you intend to run Linux. Older cards have had more time for them to fix the inevitable bugs. I run a GTX980Ti 😅 with the closed-source drivers on an Arch-based system and I’m honestly surprised a video driver update hasn’t seriously broken anything yet.

grub’s always been a hack. The first stage in 512 byte boot sector chainloads the second stage in the space between boot sector and the first sectors of first partition. Second stage chainloads the kernel. (This is my primitive gist.)

grub was never made for security, it just exists in a place where one would think security would be priority… but again, physical access = pwned, etc.

Not quite the same, but funny: I recently unlocked an HDD from a car head unit to prove to a friend that it was only storing music ripped from its CD drive (and the associated minimal CD title database)… Toshiba master HDD password is 32 spaces. 😅

Better replace your keyboard everytime you leave it unattended, someone could put a keylogger in it. Don’t forget to check for hidden pinhole cameras around that capture you inputting your passwords. Etc, etc. Those even work against an encrypted drive…