Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

(Column) - A while back, I made a comment with regard to how great it would be to have a single, collective HCL (hardware compatibility list) for all of the popular Linux distributions. At the time, I felt very strongly that if we had a one single collective database of hardware that was known to work with the latest distributions, life would be a lot easier.

For me, the problem is that so many of the HCLs out there are terrible. Either the concept is simply not a priority, or instead, the companies have allowed their efforts of keeping their users up-to-date go downhill.

I believe that two of the biggest culprits for poor HLCs would have to be Linspire and Xandros. Both companies have done little to keep their databases up-to-date. I was even told once by Linspire that it was supposed to be revamped soon. To my knowledge, this has still not happened.

On the opposite end, we have Ubuntu. Ubuntu has worked pretty hard at making a clear HLC all but impossible to locate on their website (my opinion); however, they are doing some spectacular things by making sure their distribution works well with your hardware.

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