Driver support?

[Colo2]

Why do people complain about the "crappy driver support" in linux? If you ask me, Ubuntu driver support is so much better than XP's, and its not far off being as good as vista's.

In ubunt 8.10, ubuntu didn't like my laptop and my laptop didn't like ubuntu, in 9.04, everything works (including desktop effects right out of the box). So whats the big issue? Why, when I install XP and (sometimes) vista, do I need to go on a 50 minute tour of the world wide web to find drivers?

[Swarms]

Ubuntu support much more hardware out of the box than Windows XP, but what XP doesn't support from the start, you are almost perfectly able to find on the net. That is not the case with Ubuntu.

[stwschool]

For me, ubuntu 9.04 does better on drivers than Win7 out of the box, but obviously for more obscure peripherals Windows typically has the option of downloading a driver. That said, for most non-exotic setups, linux does just fine.