Well, I always hear people dog Linux because of a lack of hardware support...

With that in mind, after reading some rather nasty posts against Linux the night before, I installed Windows XP at work. Amazingly, after authorizing my new copy of Windows and selling my soul with windows genuine advantage so I could update I was ready to roll. Nope! I installed on a Dell 745 with a farily new ATI video card and a standard ethernet. Windows could not and did not install any drivers! Lucky for me we had the Dell drivers laying around. Then I remembered, Windows never really gives you drivers the hardware company or one of it's third party buddies does. Hmm.... How soon we forget when you avoid something...

After 19 years of this crap I recall many a bad time not being able to use hardware on Windows, because the "hardware" is a bit dated so they charge for the drivers and Windows never had a driver. I'd rather wait then have to pay for somthing I already paid for. Now I can't switch hardware on Windows without an aggravation!

Then the next day, today, a guy I work with says to me that he needs to switch to 2003, because Windows 2000 professional will not get the daylight savings time update, this includes the older versions of Exchange and other odds and ends we run on our 2000 servers in our development environment as well. He then tells me that the 2000 daylights savings patch will cost $4000.00. I was smirking! Not because of him, he is a Linux guy also, so we talked about that a bit.

Then I come home and see the the Mac commercial where the Man In Black ask a question everytime the Mac guys says something to the Windows guy. I lost it! They took my joke about Windows new security in IE 7 and Vista! Damn, where's my money? That's my damned joke! Well excluding the Mac! I started joking about the popups in IE6 on 2003 server, which I call security warning spam, or SWS.

So Linux gets no support from hardware venders and manufacturers and typically rely on part time coders working for free without any specs and seem to get most hardware working, while Microsoft has everyone in their pocket and help to keep these specs away from Linux and can't load the basic of divers on most machines.

So on my laptop at home with a Wacom, my old 1.8ghz at work, and now a new Dell all install Linux with full driver support, not Windows!

For all these nasty Windows lovers, enjoy spending your money and dreaming about the support you get from Microsoft. Remember to rewrite all you code, again, for Vista. Remember to do something interesting, like search Google on how to fix a stupid registry problem or maybe play a video game. Remember, you can't use touch, tail, cat, grep - ah forget it... Have fun! By the way, my Linux machine had the daylight savings update months ago and I didn't even realize it was patched, it just was...

and last, don't bother using all those great free open source programs that are now available for Windows! They pretty much all started on Linux, god forbid!