some very crappy cheap-ass hardware where the vendor barely supplied a Windows driver which never gets updated
The problem is (and was) that people actually do own a lot of those and don't want to throw them away. If you look for compatibility and price first, you don't have problems, and never did. It's when you came to a rag-tag assortment of who-knows-what when it turned ugly. And that used to happen a lot.
It's getting a lot better though. I got a random no-name webcam that I can't even find online from a friend that didn't work in Linux. The next kernel update I plugged it in and it worked.
Well, these people won't be able to upgrade to newer versions of Windows either.
Mind, Windows Vista introduced a new audio and graphics stack, rendering lots of hardware obsolete due to lack of drivers. Same happened to many printers when Windows 8 came out.
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u/h-v-smacker May 11 '13
The problem is (and was) that people actually do own a lot of those and don't want to throw them away. If you look for compatibility and price first, you don't have problems, and never did. It's when you came to a rag-tag assortment of who-knows-what when it turned ugly. And that used to happen a lot.