Quote:
Originally Posted by hobbes_fan
Linux is a lot better in the aspect that its free and it's constantly evolving. It's hardware support is still limited but by nature it's designed to be deployable on any config. It's at stage where there are specific situations I'd use linux - a NAS, a torrentbox, a a small home server. It's just not a full desktop replacement ATM.
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I have to respectfully disagree with this opinion. Other than support for some wifi hardware, and perhaps some older devices like scanners with proprietary interfaces, there's very little hardware that Linux doesn't support out of the box. In fact, it can be much harder to build a Windows machine from scratch since you'll often need to dig up manufacturers' drivers for various hardware devices like network cards that are supported natively in any modern Linux distribution.
My daughter has a Dell notebook running Ubuntu, and I have two desktop machines running Fedora 8. (I also have a server and a firewall both running CentOS.) I don't care about playing games on a PC; we have a PS3 for that. I can't think of a task I've needed to do on a desktop machine that I haven't been able to do using Linux in the three or so years I've been using it as my only desktop OS.