Oh fuck yeah, especially for laptops. I was pleasantly surprised when all of the hardware on my new to me 13 year old laptop just worked out of the box with Debian 13. I was expecting to have to fix something.
Depends how old. I have a Phenom system with an iGPU and an audio chip that went unsupported fow a few years. Then after a few cycles of updates, it became supported again.
Same with the GPU of an old laptop with an Optimus system. At some point nothing would be working correctly but then new nouveau (huh) modules got out and this old hardware could suddenly work much better than before.
Apparently I have a lot of hardware that goes through a phase of being unsupported in Linux for a while, to working better than ever before.
Old hardware = better drivers
Oh fuck yeah, especially for laptops. I was pleasantly surprised when all of the hardware on my new to me 13 year old laptop just worked out of the box with Debian 13. I was expecting to have to fix something.
Depends how old. I have a Phenom system with an iGPU and an audio chip that went unsupported fow a few years. Then after a few cycles of updates, it became supported again.
Same with the GPU of an old laptop with an Optimus system. At some point nothing would be working correctly but then new nouveau (huh) modules got out and this old hardware could suddenly work much better than before.
Apparently I have a lot of hardware that goes through a phase of being unsupported in Linux for a while, to working better than ever before.