My experience is, in Windows, it’s not the drivers breaking that you have to worry about. I just recently retired my old nettop at the shop, we are talking about a circa 2003 Sempron that went from XP RTM – last patch Tuesday, know how many broken drivers I had with no less than 3 SPs and countless patches? NONE. Say what you will about MSFT but I just recently retired my old nettop at the shop, we are talking about a circa 2003 Sempron that went from XP RTM – last patch Tuesday, know how many broken drivers I had with no less than 3 SPs and countless patches? NONE.Īnd THAT is what you are competing against, until I as a system builder and retailer can slap the latest Ubuntu on a desktop or laptop and know that the odds are better than 90% that the customer can update/upgrade for the typical 5 year lifespan without ending up a mess? Then Linux will stay off my shelves and without retail sales and more importantly support Linux is going nowhere fast on the desktop. If you want to know why Linux desktop adoption is lower than the margin for error,even when MSFT puts out the most hated release since MSBob? Its the drivers,its a mess. If you do this on most systems what you’ll end up with is a broken mess, even bog standard hardware like Realtek and Via will often end up with trashed drivers which again in 2013 ia aimply unacceptable.
#Ralink wireless utility for windows xp install#
Oh and before anybody says “it isn’t a fair test because you don’t/can’t upgrade Windows” show me a distro that gets a decade of patches WITHOUT upgrading or paying an insane yearly license and I’ll concede the point, until then the only way to keep patches current is to jump on the upgrade treadmill.ĭownload the version of your distro from 5 years ago and install it,making sure all the drivers are working, in the case of Ubuntu this would be 10.10 which just FYI support ended in 2012, and then upgrade to current using ONLY the GUI, no CLI or “open Bash and type” allowed as Joe Average doesn’t have the skills nor desire to learn CLI and frankly in 2013 they shouldn’t have to. Its really easy and shows what a mess Linux drivers are and actually tries to tip things in favor of Linux by only requiring HALF the support a standard Windows release gets. That said until Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular can fix the frankly abysmal driver situation? Then Linux on the desktop will remain lower than the margin for error.įor an easy to replicate example take any old machine, or make a partition on your current one and take the “Hairyfeet Challenge”.
Win 8.1, SteamOS, enty of OSNews of late.