Re: "Drivers" me mad...
I built a new PC in 2004, Athlon64, SATA HDD, DVD, no floppy... And swappable hard drives. The drive with Linux installed like a dream, slap the DVD in the drive and wait 30 minutes while it chugged away.
Windows? No. No hard drive attached to the PC! Hmm. The motherboard supplier provided a floppy with the drivers. I borrowed a USB floppy from a friend. Windows found the drivers... Then reset the USB bus before trying to load them! Luckily the shop where I bought the components was very friendly and lent me an internal floppy drive, 10 minutes later, Windows had found the drivers and loaded them! I then returned the floppy drive to the shop.
I also had an Acer laptop, with ATi Radeon X800m graphics. That couldn't even install Linux in VESA mode! I had to do a command line install, then download the ATi drivers and link them into the Kernel... I think it took a good 18 months, back then, before even rudimentary support was built into Linux for the graphic chip!
Both sides of the fence "could do better". Although, these days, both do a half-way decent job of installing from scratch, as long as you have a compatible network driver in your toolbox...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
