Man, it sure is nice.... 4668 plus 1
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The vast majority of hardware will work with linux. Period. The vast majority of hardware won't work...
Sinister Midget Does "work" mean much of the photo printing capability of my HP PhotoSmart 1215 is unavailable under Linux? Yes...
No, it really is. Most hardware these days hooks into mature, standardized ports and talks in standard ways. More all the time, it makes sense from the manufacturer's perspective. Just grab a chipset, use the already-written software for it that plugs into the already-present bus, and you're done.
Disks? SCSI, IDE-SATA, USB, Firewire. That's about it. All of them "just work". CD-DVD? Same deal, and Linux can write to writable media out of the box on practically every distro out there. Flash drives, same thing.
(Windows 2000 Perfmon doesn't like it if you remove a USB drive... depending on exactly how you do it, you may need to restart the Perfmon service to get disk counters working again.)
Sound? Haven't run into a sound chipset that Linux won't handle. Certainly anything aimed at the consumer-business desktop market.
Video? Mildly irritating, you have to use third-party drivers to get 3D. Note that, for any card I've messed with, Linux will go *way* past Windows.
Network cards? Very nice. I can't even remember having a problem since the ISA days with anything.
Just about everything else connects via USB or Firewire. There are actual standards for how those things work, open ones. USB joysticks, mice, keyboards? "Just work." Most other USB devices have similar standards.
On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:04:48 -0400, DFS You're condemning Linux as useless because *your* printer doesn't work? It's funny how you...
One place where you might have *any* point is scanners and printers. *Some* of them don't have Linux support, but from what I've seen most do, and out of the box, too.
About the only other area I can think of offhand is Wifi cards. That's a legal thing, really, not a technical issue. Most cards *do* "just work", and of the ones that don't, NDISwrappers addresses most of *them*. I know, I'm using wireless at home. No probs.
Well, actually, some probs... with Windows.
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Kier wrote on Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:21:32 +0100 He is allowed to do that, buttuming he has the hardware...
Still haven't opened up that machine to yank the card. Hasn't been a high priority, since it works with Linux.
-- Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn