BW )(: Institute advises EU to forbid windows pre-instaled on PC's

[Matthew Toseland]

On Tuesday 25 September 2007 10:57, Steve Woods wrote:
> Quoting Andy Gale <andy at mentalist.co.uk>:
> > It's not that simple though is it? As a lot of stuff doesn't have
> > reliable enough drivers on Linux for the vendor to certify that it'll
> > work properly? It needs to start somewhere, though doesn't it? Are the
> > Dell machines specifically for Linux?
> >
> What's a Linux driver? The last time I needed one of those was for a 
winmodem
> years ago. 99.99% of kit just works straight away without any faffing 
around,
> unlike another allegedly popular OS.

It Just Works if your hardware is old(ish) and/or server-centric.

On the other hand if you have a modern 3d card you need proprietary drivers 
(which means you can't report kernel oopses when you get them...), and if you 
need e.g. a webcam, you're in real trouble (no USB ISO transfers on USB2 so 
unless the cam is actually a USB2 device you have to turn off USB2 and use 
one device per root hub, and most webcams not supported)... Even a relatively 
new motherboard is often a problem. My built-in sound still doesn't work, 
long after I bought the board (asus, there is a driver, it doesn't produce 
any sound). Oh, and there's the SMBFS-is-slow-on-most-network-drivers problem 
(if you have local Windows users).

But it's improving ... and if the hardware is supported, it probably does work 
out of the box.
> 
> Woodsy
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