Home PC hardware with Trisquel

Best way to test is to burn a LiveDVD of Trisquel 8. You can run it without affecting the system or the hardware.

However, the biggest loss you will have is in terms of graphical power. Nvidia cards don't work properly with Free Software only. Your mileage may vary but forget about 3d and all that stuff.

> I'd like to install Trisquel on it but want to know if there's any
> potential conflict with the hardware and if anyone has recommendations
> for potential conflicts with the software.

Most hardware components should work fine. The two that sometimes don't
are WiFi and graphics. As GNUser says, you can boot into a live USB and
try Trisquel without affecting your current system. See:
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/starting-installable-live-system

> NVIDIA GeForcce 550 Ti graphics card.

I'm not familiar with that particular card, but I think that the
situation for Nvidia cards is usually that there are

- proprietary Nvidia drivers: have 3D acceleration but do not respect
your freedom and are often buggy

- free Nouveau drivers: no 3D acceleration, but are free and less likely
to break your system

For 3D acceleration, the best free option at this time is Intel
integrated graphics, but if you're stuck with Nvidia the Noveau drivers
are your best bet.

Just disable "Secure Boot" and try Trisquel, then see what happens.

I recently tested a Skylake barebone (HP Pro Desk 400 G2). To my surprise, everything works excellently under Trisquel or deblobbed Debian. It is true that Skylake's integrated graphics and audio require non-free firmware. But without these non-free firmware they still work fine (with acceptable graphics performance). The WLAN adapter I installed is an Atheros AR9462 (M.2 form factor) so it works fine, too.

I gave said barebone to my local community. They said that it was possible to neutralize the ME using "me_cleaner", and this means that there is no Boot Guard enforced (The CPU is replaceable). Additionally, starting Skylake, VT-d feature is supported by both CPU and chipset. IOMMU is available even on this lowest-end H110 platform.

Insisting on what nadebula.1984 wrote: you may get a better experience with Intel's integrated graphics, i.e., without the nVidia card, hence a reduced energy consumption too.

My laptop has a Kaby Lake processor, the generation after Skylake. Sadly, the firmware blob for Kaby Lake is significantly larger than the one for Skylake. I do not use it, of course, because I value my freedom. I use Trisquel 8's default kernel... and I am glad with the graphical performances: I daily play 1080p videos without any problem, I can play at that same resolution SuperTuxKart (the version in Trisquel 8's repository) at ~18 FPS, etc.

Intel's firmware is supposed to partially implement three specific features (but without freedom 1, we cannot know if that is really all it does): https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/firmware

I appreciate all of the thoughtful responses! Thank you, again. I suspected that the NVIDIA card would be a problem. Since I'm not a big gamer I wasn't concerned with 3D graphics. My PC is primarily used for chess software and game database storage and general computing.