Linux Offers Superb Hardware Support

Often, people are afraid that Linux won’t offer them full support for all of their hardware, but more often than not, full-functionality of peripherals and other hardware can be retained. Sometimes it requires a little effort, but it can be done. Sometimes, nothing has to be done, in the case of blogger John Goerzen. He was impressed that after upgrading a four-year old machine with a crippled motherboard, Linux booted no problem, with no nagging “where the heck is that driver?” errors.

I’ll be the first to admit.. that doesn’t always happen, but I’ve been in the same situation as John before, where things DID go that smoothly. One regard where I feel Linux is superior to Windows is it’s no nonsense hardware detection. The other day, I casually plugged in my Playstation 3 gamepad to charge it (to save turning on the console), only to notice that the computer (Gentoo) actually picked up on it. I was goofing around with an NES emulator only a minute after I plugged it in.. no extra drivers were needed.

Even though I had switched from the default Debian “supports everything” kernel to a K7 kernel, it still booted. And every single piece of hardware was supported immediately. There was no “add new hardware” wizard that popped up, no “I’ve found new hardware” boxes. It just worked, silently, with no need to tell me anything or have me click on anything.

Source: John Goerzen Blog