On Wednesday 15 December 2004 8:56 am, Christian Convey wrote:
As much as I like Linux and its ideals, I thought to myself, "I've
never had to deal with issues like these in Windows. I buy a product,
plug it in, and almost always, it just works."
Well, duh. You were shopping for hardware that would work with Windows
and not thinking about compatability with other OS's. Obviously, you
wouldn't buy hardware that's a pain to use in Windows; why you would
fail to provide Linux the same courtesy and expect it to go just as
smoothly is beyond me.
The difference has to do entirely with vendor attitude. Not all vendors
are equal: You have some that sell broken hardware and patch around the
hardware with software, taxing the CPU instead (any manufacturer that
makes WinHardware), you have some that are neutral and open the specs
so the open source folks can write their own drivers (thus giving back
to the community that gives them customers), and then there's the
companies that only want the customers but don't want to do anything
towards that end (nVidia and it's closed drivers).