Lose The Driver Disk, Install Linux!

      by Wyatt Walter

I find it absolutely amazing how far Linux distros have come in the five or six short years that I’ve been using it. Anyone who uses Windows because they don’t want to fight driver problems in Linux hasn’t used a Linux distro in the last year or so. In fact, I had almost forgotten the horrid world that I had come from just a few years ago. I’ve been a bit disconnected from the desktop support world and had a brief encounter with reality.

A few weeks ago I found out that my parents-in-law wanting to replace their very old PC that they had in their basement. I think the machine got turned on once a month, if even that, so their requirements were very minimal. I happened to have a PC running at home that really was just burning electricity, but wasn’t a bad machine, so I volunteered it. After considering my options, I decided to take on the project with Ubuntu instead of Windows. I was a bit leery and made sure that I still had an old Windows XP license available just in case before I took on the project.

As soon as I got there, my wife’s sister handed me the USB wireless card they had been using. The first thing that popped into my head was “Crap, and I left my XP disks at home..”. Given my past experience with wireless networking in Linux, I was ready to give up before I started. Just to humor myself, I decided to plug it in. Voila! It detected the wireless card and was already asking me what wireless network I wanted to join! I couldn’t believe it. It was great. Every device they threw at me after and asked if I needed drivers disks for, I just proudly said “Nope” and kept on trucking.

Ever since that day, I’ve noticed how many times people cite driver installation and hardware support as reasons for choosing Windows. In my little experience (limited as it may have been), the trend was actually completely the opposite. I didn’t have to find my restore media. I didn’t have to install the drivers for the video card, sound card, or wireless card. I didn’t have to go searching around my filing cabinet for my Office license. Ubuntu “just worked”.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 27th, 2009

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