[Dunbar]

Who writes the drivers for this software that 'Just Works'?

Over and over again I see commercial OS vendors implicitly credited for writing drivers that were actually supplied by the hardware manufacturers themselves.

The vast majority of the general population find that their Windows and OS X machines 'Just Work' because they come preconfigured with all of the manufacturer's drivers already installed.

Linux can't 'Just Work' in the Desktop space because:

1. It doesn't have majority market share (like Microsoft), so not all hardware manufacturers will make it a priority for their hardware to have good Linux drivers.

2. It doesn't control the hardware platform (like Apple), so it is likely that a significant proportion of users will have machines that have unsupported / badly supported hardware.

[ugh]

Tough luck. Life isn’t fair.

Linux has to solve this problem, excuses be damned (and it has become quite good at solving this problem – most hardware just works).

[adolfojp]

That is true but also irrelevant. It places blame and provides an explanation but it doesn't change the result.

[radioact1ve]

Same excuses I've been reading since I first started using Linux around 2001.