Microsoft launches new pre-Windows 7 anti-Linux offensive

David M Williams
Monday, 21 September 2009 17:14

Opinion and Analysis

For instance, it is a widely-regarded myth that Windows has superb hardware support and that Linux does not.

Historically, there was a reason this view came about. Historically, loading on a Linux distribution still resulted in devices not working while it was still evolving to the state it is at today. Nevertheless, with experimentation, community support and Internet searching often times success would result.

Nowadays the situation is different; in previous Linux Distillery postings I’ve booted a Fujitsu S6420 laptop from a Ubuntu Live CD and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One netbook as well as various other combinations of machines. In each case they operated perfectly from the first boot.

Yet, even if esoteric hardware can be found for which there is no Linux driver available this still isn’t a world apart from the Microsoft Windows experience. Nobody needs to look far to find horror stories of Windows Vista hardware incompatibilities and even now Windows 7 does not still enjoy full driver support.

This situation should change in time, but it is not guaranteed. Just this last week a colleague asked for help getting his much-loved trusty old Canon multifunction unit to work on his Windows Vista laptop. A thorough search found the unit had been orphaned with no drivers since Windows XP. Google revealed many others similarly searching fruitlessly.

Yet, while Microsoft might change driver abstraction layers and break compatibility with successive operating system releases once a device has been made to work under Linux it can almost be guaranteed to always work forever more due to the nature of open source software.

I’m sure readers will have their bit to say on Microsoft’s latest strategy and the truthfulness or otherwise of these claims so let me conclude with this note:

What value is a column that espouses Microsoft’s own Windows Live as a virtue? Personally, I’d have liked to see “one-stop application updating” listed. Or perhaps “license free.” Why aren't these on the list?