[mjg59]

Some of the context here is that that at the time, Ubuntu was aiming to work on as close to 100% of existing PCs as possible to make it available to the largest number of users. Knoppix had a lot of great features and also was very opinionated, and that had an influence on the set of hardware it worked well on by default. I evaluated basically every decision made there in terms of whether Ubuntu should adopt the same ones, and there were several that were just not good choices in terms of supporting the widest set of hardware possible.