# Community Help: Check the Help Files, then come here to ask! > Newbies Corner >  Linux compatibility with new hardware standards

## webnauseum

My first thread here. :EEK!: 

I'm getting ready to buy a new laptop, and desire guidance on hardware compatibility.

Currently I'm using knoppix 9.1 booted from a flask drive, on a 10 year old ASUS that also has a resident installation of Windows 7

My goal is to buy a nicer, newer laptop, which likely will have a Windows 11 system installed,  I hope to continue using knoppix booted from the USB flash drive.....PLUS I hope the new system will have an internal drive sufficiently large that I can repartition and dual boot with a resident copy of UBUNTU.  I'm leaning towards 250 GB for windows, 250 GB for Ubuntu, and a 500 GB shared extended logical Fat data partition.

My concerns are  (1) UEFI vs Bios....(2) NVMe  compatibility with Linux    (3) potential  for data corruption "gotchas" if windows and Linux both share access to the  extended logical drive.

So:

1. I have no experience with UEFI  is this something I want to avoid, or is this technology  "linux friendly"?   I guess it's actually located on the HD, and not in a bios chip located on the Mother board? Which gives me special concerns pertaining to my intention to continue to boot from flash drives.   Does UEFI support booting from a USB Flash drive? And will UEFI work satisfactorily with a linux based multi-boot loader?

2. Will current Linux distributions include driver support for NVMe architecture?

3. This is not so simple as it seems. I had one salesman almost talk me into buying a Laptop featuring Intel's "Optane" glorified 32 GB cache performance enhancement. But put off the purchase long enough to do a little research...and was aghast at the horror stories about how multiple operating systems contend with one another on shared-access storage devices.  The trouble being that the 32 GB is nonvolatile memory, and retains "frequently used" programs between boots, so what windows THOUGHT was on the drive, might not be there next time...if the Linux system is booted in between (and vice versa)

This later discovery (confirmed at the Intel source) has me a bit nervous about NVMe technology in general. ARE ANY OF YOU USING NVMe ARCHITECTURE in a dual boot environment, with no problems?

Long post, I know. But I wanted to get the my entire area of concern "on the table: from square one


And lastly, I know I didn't mention it earlier, but what about support for Nvidia graphics chips? Seems like I've heard some buzz that might be a problem area, requiring a hack to get working that might be above my level of expertise....thoughts please?

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