Thread: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
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Benson is offline Benson
2008-05-01 , 19:00
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#32
Originally Posted by qole View Post
I'll give you a lollipop if XP even installs drivers for the ethernet hardware. If you don't have that, you can't get on the 'net. And if you can't get on the 'net, you'd better have a driver disk, otherwise, you're dead in the water.
I think the lollipop offer was only good if XP installed the driver itself, from the XP CD; the driver disk is being considered separately.

In which case, it's not surprising; Microsoft owns the market, so all hardware people make Windows drivers, and distribute them with the hardware. Linux is scarce and mildly fragmented, so many drivers come from "the community" and are distributed with (and tweaked, auto-configed, etc. to suit) the distro.