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Comment by reledi | Hacker News Reader

This a common myth. I'm going to assume that you don't tinker with your machines often. Whenever I do a fresh install of Windows, I go on a wild goose chase for drivers.

The current Linux kernel supports more devices than any single Windows release. Linux also supports more legacy devices than Windows Vista or Windows 7 and supports numerous architectures not supported at all by Windows.

In the case when there's no support for certain hardware, it's often the manufacturers who are at fault. They don't spend the resources to create the drivers or they make it difficult for the Linux community to make them.

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Support for devices is generally ok. Things will generally "work". However, configuring the devices can be an extreme pain. An example, which is trivial in OS X and Windows, is tablet drivers. In order to adjust sensitivity on my bamboo tablet in Ubuntu, I had to make adjustments via the command line after adding PPAs, installing packages, and fiddling around with values for over an hour. Don't get me wrong, I love the command line, but some things just shouldn't have to be done there.

12.04 on Dell E6530. Display drivers don't work properly (you need to turn Optimus off in the BIOS). Logitech wireless mouse didn't work properly. Multimon support is lacking. 64 bit version is unworkable, 32 bit requires a lot of tweaking. I spent a whole day installing 64 bit, installing 32 bit, different drivers, trying Bumblebee (doesn't work). At some point an update came that fixed the mouse issues (this was 3 months ago).

In Windows 7 everything works perfectly out of the box. Two external monitors, no problem (Ubuntu only supports one). Wireless mouse, no problem.

A friend of mine had an external WD drive that I could not get to work Under Windows 7. It worked under Linux, but not windows.

I finally found out that there was an incorrect drive letter allocation (stuffed if I know why). We frigged around trying to allocate a drive letter through admin settings. We finally got it to work, but it wouldn't recognise the file system. We reformatted it and it worked fine.

Then there was the time the keyboard wouldn't work under Windows 7. It appeared and disappeared. It also worked under Ubuntu.

The point is that your mileage will vary depending on the hardware and operating system. I find Linux easier to fault find, whereas Windows is a disaster to fault find. My Windows faults normally end up with "just re-format it and start again".

This is all obviously anecdotal but one would assume Windows would be #1 priority for hardware vendors to test against as it's the most popular platform. Microsoft also has WHQL which helps to some degree in ensuring quality. I can't imagine an x86 laptop vendor not testing their hardware with Windows but I can definitely imagine them not testing Ubuntu.

In terms of recovering from faults Windows is much easier for me which isn't surprising since I've been using Windows for a long time. I find things like the Device Manager to be more user friendly than looking at kernel logs.

(I also have an external WD drive, no problems)

EDIT: By the way power management in Ubuntu on this laptop is all broken as well. It doesn't detect closing the lid, I have to go through some voodoo sequence to get it to sleep.

It's not a myth. Linux support for newer hardware is still abysmal. Video card drivers still suck. Multiple display (more than two) support is bad-bad-bad. Unity and xinerama still don't click.

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