Have you had any sort of experience with any version of Trisquel and a gaming motherboard?

What's a gaming motherboard? You must understand, that's just a marketing term. The important question is not "gaming" or non gaming. It's which chipset?

Tell us what chipset the motherboard has. Only then can your question be answered.

There are mboards with nvidia, via, and Intel chipsets. From my experience I can say Intel works great. But my board would not be considered "gaming".

But the easiest and most reliable way to know is: make a bootable flash drive and boot from it on the PC in question. This way you'll know if everything works or not.

Hi Cyberhawk:

Your answer is full of useful information that prompts me to keep on studying.

It's about 8 years since I assembled my last PC and a lot of things seem to have changed (at least at my location) since then.

My motherboard with an LGA755 socket has developed a faulty capacitor and I am searching for a new motherboard to replace it.

At a computer store I was offered a "gaming motherboard"
Because I haven't been and I am not interested in gaming I was just wondering if I could use that sort of MB for my work at home.

So for the time being I haven't a "PC with a gaming motherboard" to test Trisquel with it. This is why I made that sort of original post.

Thank you for your comment and time

Most gamers I know had to compromise on software freedom because of the hardware they insisted was necessary for their gaming.

Not being a gamer myself, I'm afraid I cannot be of much more help on the topic, except suggesting you visit some of the recent threads about hardware compatibility with a fully freedom respecting OS. For instance:

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/freedom-issues-graphics-cards-wireless-nics-and-imaging-devices
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/amd-and-libre-drivers

Since your concern is specifically about the motherboard, you might still have a chance do dodge the devil.

If you want to play 3D games on your Trisquel machine, there is one (just one!) option for maximum performance as far as graphics cards go. You need a GeForce card that is supported by the nouveau driver. Don't listen to people who'll tell you, "Linux supports AMD cards very well and better than NVIDIA cards". These people confuse the operating system (GNU/Linux) with the kernel itself (Linux) and are probably not aware, that Trisquel uses linux-libre, which does not provide non-free firmware, NECESSARY to run 3D acceleration with AMD Radeon cards. The supposedly free AMD driver is not a full driver, but a firmware-loader. It loads non-free software, inlcuded in vanilla Linux kernel, to run stuff like 3D acceleration. On a linux-libre kernel, you don't get that kind of firmware, so AMD cards perform without 3D, and even if they do some 3D, they do it poorly and everything is more or less buggy.

There is this very useful site, h-node.org. It lists different hardware and shows how well it is supported by fully-free distributions. Here is a link to a filter that I made, to show you which graphics cards would (most likely) work with 3D acceleration.

Yes, I know, this list is shockingly short and all of those items are relatively old. But hey! Those are not necessarily low-end cards from their time. They do have some serious power still. I'm sorry, if this is not the kind of answer you wanted to hear. I don't like it either. But the big companies don't want free drivers for their stuff to exist. It's not that no one out there is willing to make them. It's they are doing their best to prevent it. So far, only some GeForce cards have been reverse-engineered. Intel integrated graphics, strangly enough, did not need to be reverse engineered, that one is supported easily.

If you are only installing games, that are themselves free software, the above mentioned cards will really make everything work flawlessly and the performance will be very good too, unless you are that one guy who needs 100fps for everything or it's not enough. There are very good free software games around! Minetest is HUGE and performs similar to Minecraft and I think even does more.

If you wish to install games that are proprietary software, well that's not something Trisquel was made to do, but there is nothing physically preventing you from doing. There is no support for that sort of thing here. If you don't see a way around buying proprietary software, at least buy it used, to not fuel the economy of producing it. Software should be licensed in a way that respects the users freedom! We don't try to achieve a world where programmers operate on donations only, business can work out with free licensing too. But right now business does not do that sort of thing. So my personal solution for the time being: not to buy unethical proprietary software at all and if it cannot be avoided, buy it used, so the companies don't make money off of their wrong-doing!

I have been gaming on Linux wherever possible for several years now. A 'gaming' board usually means the ability to put more power into the CPU, along with extra PCI-e slots for GPU(s). They claim to use higher quality components than 'normal' boards, but who knows on that one.

In terms of freedom, boards beyond LGA775 generally do not support a free BIOS, such as Libreboot. Some do support Coreboot, which is better than OEM but still not fully free.

Both my current MB + CPU combo, as well as GPU require blobs to function. I have been running them for several years since becoming more involved in Software Freedom. As and when they cease to function, I will then look to move to more freedom-compatible hardware. The Nouveau site provides a useful chart as to the current status of support for their various cards.

[Nouveau](https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html)

I have never tried running my current system under a Free Operating System such as Trisquel, but regularly use a Virtual Machine to run Trisquel for day-to-day tasks.

Good luck with the repair/replacement, hopefully you get up and running again as you want! Hopefully my ramble is somewhat useful to you!!

I agree that a gaming motherboard is a marketing term but I have used my gaming systems on Trisquel so I can give some input. My Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra worked just fine as does my MSI B450-A Pro Max and my Asus Z87-A. The only thing I have not work on Linux in general, not just trisquel, was the software to change the LED colors on the X470 Aorus Ultra. I cold do it through the BIOS but not within the OS.