[stonemetal]

When I bought a new box last year I couldn't get wireless to work. Until I went in to some random config file and forced it to load an older version of the driver because the new fancy version that is shipped doesn't actually work.

But thanks for proving his point by calling him a liar.

[0x12]

Yes, because we all know that the occasional configuration problem is unique to Linux.

Really.

Counterpoint to your story: I bought a notebook with a 3G card in it, couldn't for the life of me get the thing to work under windows vista (which it came installed with). It got so bad that I suspected that the hardware must be broken.

For kicks I booted the machine using ubuntu NBR, not only did it detect and configure all the other peripherals properly but it also auto-detected the 3G card and it made it work instantly without further configuration, other than clicking the 'connect' entry in the menu and entering the PIN code (four times '0').

Just because there is the occasional glitch I'm not going to say 'windows vista doesn't support lots of hardware'.

If you say your soundcard/wireless/etc doesn't work under a major distribution then that's really unfortunate, but that does not make your story representative of the vast majority of Linux users. Personally I haven't seen any configuration issues in Linux for over a decade unless it was because I was using some very rare and either very new or totally obscure hardware, and even in those cases I could always get it to work by using google for a bit.

Except for that one time with the 3G card under windows. But that's not proof of anything other than that there was at least one instance where someone had a hardware issue with a windows machine.

[stonemetal]

My experience flipping through the bug reports for ubuntu is that hardware isn't 90% solved it is more like 70% solved(the scary part is that each release tends to move that 70% coverage around a bit.) Both windows' and Apple's hardware support is poor as well but they fixed it by non-technical means(control of the hardware distribution channel.) Which is a perfectly viable channel for Linux, and seems to be working well for them(System 76 and Dell's Ubuntu boxes.) However as an OS that is primarily distributed after the fact, it would be nice to see user friendly hardware configuration.

[drieddust]

You must be a very lucky. Reason I am not running Linux is because I was not able to find a decent driver for my latop's Synaptic touchpad.

Now please do not say you can write a driver yourself.

[0x12]

I'm not lucky. I read before I buy.