@jdw - posting links without context is generally frowned upon here. Please edit your answer and provide some real content here, perhaps a summary of what you're liking to.

If you had taken a second to click any link you would have seen that there are a billion pages there with thousands of vendors with compatibility ratings. @ErikA the context is the question. I didn't see the need to state that I was providing information that addresses the question.

@jdw - Well feel free to continue posting mediocre answers then. I was merely trying to give you a helpful tip that will result in better quality answers and more rep for you.

Next time I'll say "This link contains information that might be of use to you" just in case that's totally lost on the questioner.

@jdw - The SE sites aim to be the authoritative source for information on their topics, not just for the original question asker, but also for anyone else that stumbles upon the QA in the future. What happens when tldp.org goes away or that link goes away? Your answer goes from being useful to being useless. As such, provide a bit of context/information in your answer and then provide the link for more details.

I could see that if I was referencing joeblow.com, but tldp has been around since 2003 - much longer than ServerFault - and it used massively for exactly this purpose: "Will this hardware for on Linux?" It is the authoritative source on the Internet for this. It's amazing to me that the OP did not stumble across it since it is the number 1 Google hit for almost every permutation of 'linux hardware compatibility'. Tldp ain't going anywhere so it is a solid link that can easily stand alone.

@jdw - well you're succeeding in being more and more condescending and unhelpful as this discussion goes on. Recognizing that you could have (and should have) provided context is too much for you?

yes?

So, I don't really understand why you're trolling me so hard. You don't think my answer is very good, I disagree, what's the problem?

I'm not trolling you. Aside from the lack of content, your answer is fine. The page you linked to is indeed helpful. I see that you're honestly trying to help, but you're new here and haven't fully come up to speed on what's expected of good answers. So I recognized that and offered a helpful tip like I have done for countless other new users who posted answers like yours. 99% of the time, those users realize that their answer can be improved and they edit it, adding content as I suggested.

OK, well...when you degenerated into goading me "Recognizing that you could have (and should have) provided context is too much for you?" you kind of lost your focus

That's when you reverted to trolling

As that is obviously meant as a shot

Call it what you like. I had tried several other times to spur you on to action, none of which worked, so I took it up a notch. At this point this discussion is becoming pointless. If you want to succeed at SF (or any other SE site), you'd best take my advice.

It's pretty hard to reconcile your purported genuine concern for the sites when you go into trolling mode three responses in. You're just annoyed with the fact that I am new and stood by my answer and you're trying to hide it behind this altruisting "Oh, it's not good for the site" thing.

Bottom line is that we disagree and that's gonna happen. Next time move on instead of trolling.

@jdw It's not just him. ErikA might be the mouthpiece this time, but there's plenty of us who are more than willing to help you craft a better answer. The link destination really doesn't matter, Answers should contain some sort of context, even if it's a brief description of why the Questioner needs to find the information on a linked website instead of SF.

Please try take Constructive Criticism and learn from it. You are free to disagree with the advice, and leave your answer unedited. But that doesn't mean that ErikA was doing anything but trying to help. This is a collaborative website and we're all here to help each other, both in technical problems and in effectively communicating problems and solutions.