The best bit with Dell is that the service tag doesn't always bring up the correct machine specification on their website. Should you need to reinstall a Dell PC at any point (for example, drive failure), and don't have the driver DVD to hand, and the drivers offered for the service tag don't work, the only way to figure out what hardware is actually on the motherboard is to get the PCI vendor and device IDs from Device Manager and look them up on
pcidatabase.com, and then half the time you still can't figure out what you've got.
USB manages to cough up the product name sometimes so that you know what drivers to install, but onboard PCIe hardware still has no way to read off basic product details.
Dell used to supply driver CDs that covered several machines, and if you stockpile these, you have the joy of realising that many omitted the model numbers. Or you'd have several different CDs for different types of OptiPlex 330, as not every possible combination of hardware for that model was covered by the first CD, or by the second …
If you're looking for a new PC and you want to try out a Linux distro, the resulting mental explosion will rival Buncefield.
At least if kbdb.io ever takes off, it should be fairly easy for people to select a keyboard, even if they can't find a suitable monitor or PC.
As an aside, when I got my LG L2000CP display in 2008, there were at least two other S-IPS 1600×1200 displays on sale that I never even found. At least two of which were still widely sold for several more years, while mine was end of line old stock, and worse, one that went unwanted and unloved by the whole world. That's quite telling of just how painful it actually was to just buy a sensible monitor!
