Your lucky. For me the whole 5% is usually me doing the something dumb part, lol.

Wow, quite a cognitive leap from "HP dropped support for my 20 year old printer" to "you so-called 'experts' are what's wrong with Linux!!!"

@suicidealeggroll, I loved your post about setting up a new printer at your work. Having to sit down at each desk to reboot the windows systems, but connecting 10 linux workstations to the printer from your own desk.

I'm sold on Linux. It's funny, I ask all of our IT guys at work, and none of them know anything about Linux, or even play with it in their spare time. I'm surprised they don't branch out more.

I have a 722c myself. And aside from crusty ink cartridges that have to be soaked or heated to output ink, it works in linux.

# apt-get install hplip pnm2ppa

For some reason pnm2ppa isn't grabbed as a dependency, but the printer doesn't work without it. But by all outward appearances using the printer works even though nothing happens (without pnm2ppa).

It is frustrating that 20 years later we're still doing most of our audio setups on the commandline in linux. Although windows was never much different in that regard. That windows registry and the startup apps buried so deap. That netsh on a dos prompt to do something simple like change the MTU size of your network packets.

Windows is not all bliss. A few years ago I bought a brand new ATI Rage 128 Pro video card on FleaBay. I was surprised that they were still making the card, but it came from Hong Kong. I then discovered that the card would not work in any version of Windows that I had. Apparently ATI made a lot of different versions of that card and they are not all included in the .inf file for the driver. If Windows cant find the card in the .inf file it simply gives up. On the other hand the card works fine in Linux. Xorg automatically detects the card and installs a driver for it.

Then there are the newer versions of Windows like Vista that snub any card that doesn't meet the their very stringent hardware requirements. My NVIDIA GeForce FX5500 wasn't that old when Vista was released, but it is specifically listed as one of the cards that wouldn't work. I have never wanted to run Vista badly enough to try it.

A couple of months ago I bought a cheap copy of Windows XP just to see what it was like. A friend of mine gave me an old computer that he was going to take to the dump so I decided to install XP on it to see if it would work. It installed and worked fine, but the box didn't have a network card. I installed a cheap little Asound NIC that I had laying around. Windows XP detected the card, and obliging installed a driver for it, but I couldn't connect to anything, even though XP swore up and down that the card was working fine. I installed Slackware on another partition and the card worked fine. I eventually discovered that the card simply wouldn't work with XP's built in driver. You were supposed to play games with the OS to get it to ignore the built in driver and install one that you downloaded. At that point I stuck a 3Com card in it and solved the problem.

In my experience Linux has gotten to the point where it does a better job of detecting hardware than Windows.

Well, my Debian based system that I installed from a minimal command line install is still running beautifully and ... this post (which I forgot about) has rung true. Now I am wanting to play around and I'm going to have to look up a whole bunch and play with stuff until everything comes back. I should have written stuff down like some of you suggested.

Guess it depends on what distro....

I HATED having to install new hardware when I had Windurs! Installing drivers; re-installing drivers; rebooting the 'puter; and lets not forget the quagmire of half of your hardware/devices becoming obsolete when the manufacturer no longer makes updated drivers for when you upgrade Windurs!

I haven't had one issue with any of that since switching to Linux 4 years ago. All my old stuff was auytomatically recognized and works flawlessly- I didn't have to do a thing; and when I do buy something new, I either look for stuff that is explicitly Linux-compatible; or things which are universal (Like drag & drop MP3 players) which is pretty much what I did even when I had Windurs, as I don't want to have to futz with a plethora of special proprietary software (and it's glitches) just to transfer a file to a device or print an email.

It's funny, actually- because when I first switched to Linux, I had assumed that what the OP describes would be a problem...but it wasn't; instead, it was the solution to a bunch of problems. As far as I'm concerned, Linux just works.