The Lagoon TechMy little blog in Cyberspace.

Today I received a notification containing a comment someone posted to one of the OS talk websites I have visited before.

This person commented with an obvious bias against Windows and really did not make good arguments for Linux. By the way, this is in no way a “Windows is better than Linux” blog post (I use both Windows and Linux myself), nor do I mean any disrespect to the comment’s author.

Here is the comment (word for word) posted in red:

“on hardware support, you may think Windows is better, but it’s not. Windows is worse, MUCH worse. it does have ok hardware support, and there are a lot of devices that support it, but it’s not the manufacturers writing the drivers, it’s the community, and it’s built in to the kernel. Linux does support more hardware and supports them better. a good example is the graphics driver. on Windows, the default graphics driver is pretty bad, 3D Acceleration is not supported, OpenGL doesent work and, Colors on some chipsets are terrible (Like 4 or 8 Colors), and the resolution is low. the worst you will get with most linux distro’s is a low resolution, but most distro’s work pretty good out of the box.”

I am going to respond to this a little bit at a time. My responses will of course be in black.

————

“on hardware support, you may think Windows is better, but it’s not. Windows is worse, MUCH worse.”

How is Windows “much worse” in regard to hardware support? Almost all consumer-grade hardware (from the last 20+ years) have / still work with Windows. You need to give a source for what you claimed. I suspect this argument is FUD.

“it does have ok hardware support, and there are a lot of devices that support it, but it’s not the manufacturers writing the drivers, it’s the community, and it’s built in to the kernel.”

Pretty much to get the optimum performance out of your hardware, you need to use the manufacturer’s drivers for your hardware (that goes for Windows, Linux, UNIX, etc.)   Community reverse-engineered drivers probably will not cut it.

“Linux does support more hardware and supports them better.”

While Linux does support more hardware on paper, realistically most of the hardware everyday people and businesses use will work with Windows. Windows is not limited to x86 hardware. Both Windows Phone and Windows Embedded Compact work with ARM processors. Also, Windows Embedded Compact works with MIPS and SuperH architectures as well.

Saying that Linux “supports them better” is a blanket statement that should not be made without credible proof. I suspect this argument is FUD.

“a good example is the graphics driver. on Windows, the default graphics driver is pretty bad, 3D Acceleration is not supported, OpenGL doesent work and, Colors on some chipsets are terrible (Like 4 or 8 Colors), and the resolution is low.”

While 3D acceleration is not supported out of the box on Windows (referring to Microsoft’s Basic Windows Display Driver), you should be going ahead and installing the video card’s manufacture’s drivers anyway.

Yes, I know about nouveau on Linux (nouveau is an attempt to build an open-source Nvidia compatible video driver, by reverse engineering Nvidia’s proprietary Linux drivers), but this does not work as well as Nvidia’s proprietary video drivers.

Also, I am not sure what you mean by “Colors on some chipsets are terrible (Like 4 or 8 Colors)”. Most modern hardware (even back 10 years ago) would not be that bad out-of-the-box on Windows. I suspect this argument is FUD.

“the worst you will get with most linux distro’s is a low resolution, but most distro’s work pretty good out of the box.”

Same goes for Windows.