I consider myself to be one of the few Audiophiles on this forum, so I have had no dealings with Creative since 1995. But this concerns me as I use numerous 3rd party driver for gfx cards in particular which to my knowledge ATI and Nvidia are aware of and I wonder how this affects the numerous Linux users here.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/..._vista_driver/
Now certain functionality for hardware in my experience does not work in Linux as it is proprietary. Two that I know of is Dolby Digital LIVE! which converts mono/stereo to 5.1 Dolby Digital on the fly in high end sound cards and ATi's Universal Video Decoder which is hardware acceleration of video codecs.
If some clever bastard figures out a way to get full functionality for hardware on an opensource platform, where do they stand?