Linux vs. Windows Hardware Support: The Truth

If you’ve heard of Linux, you’ve probably also heard the following comment (or something like it):

Linux won’t be ready for mainstream use until it “just works.”

Or maybe:

I wanted to like Linux, but after installing it my (insert hardware) and (insert hardware) and (insert hardware) didn’t work.

Some are even so elegant as to say it like this:

LINUX SUX IT DONT WORK ON MY AWSOME COMPUTER. WINDOWS RULZ!

All these arguments boil down to the same flawed perception: that getting hardware to work in a Linux environment is unreasonably difficult.

I would like to provide two examples – one, an analogy; the other, a personal experience – that explain why this assessment is both unfair and unreasonable.

The Analogy

Imagine, for a moment, that you have a car that’s several years old.  You like this car – the body’s in decent shape, the color is nice, it runs well – but you’re simply not getting the performance out of it that you’d like.  Rather than buy a whole new car, you make the reasonable decision to simply upgrade the engine.

So you do some shopping around, and eventually you stumble upon a website where someone is giving away brand new engines for FREE.  The engine claims to be powerful (the article states that this type of engine is used on 80% of the world’s sports cars), reasonably easy to install and use, and you’re free to modify the engine however you would like.  In return, the website simply asks you to donate some money to their cause if you can, and pass along word of what they’re offering.

It sounds too good to be true, but since they offer to send you an engine for free, you go for it.

While you wait for the engine to arrive, you go about stripping the current engine out of your car.  You take careful notes on the location of every hose, belt, and bolt, and by the time the new engine arrives, the car is ready for it.

With the help of a friend you drop the new engine into place and reattach all the critical parts.  After checking and double-checking to make sure you haven’t missed anything, you start up the car…and to your amazement, it actually starts!  After a couple final adjustments to get everything perfect, you close the hood and take your almost-new car for a ride.

*PAUSE*

I’ll admit – no analogy is perfect.  But work with me for a moment as I explain myself.

As you have probably figured out, the car in our analogy represents a PC’s hardware, while the engine represents a PC’s operating system.

Like cars and engines, PC hardware and operating systems are theoretically interchangeable.  It might take a hacksaw and a welding iron, but with some work, you could get most any internal combustion engine to run in almost any chassis.  Similarly, it might take some time and hacking, but with some work, you could get most any OS to run on almost any PC hardware.

However, people mistakenly think that any OS should run on any hardware configuration without user intervention.  This is as stupid as thinking that you could stick any engine in any car and – without any effort – have it magically work.  Mixing and matching parts that weren’t designed for each other is not a perfect science.  It most likely takes some tweaking to ensure that everything works smoothly.

By and large, manufacturers assume the burden of ensuring that a stock engine works in its associated car.  You don’t typically buy a new car, take it home, then realize that the manufacturer has forgotten to connect three or four hoses.  (Unless it’s a Ford, of course…)  Similarly, when you buy a PC, you can be reasonably sure that the PC vendor – Dell, HP, whoever – has done their job and made sure that the computer’s hardware and OS play together nicely.

Which leads me to my first major point.

If you buy a PC with Windows and it “just works,” who cares?

Obviously a new computer with a pre-installed OS is going to “just work.”  If it doesn’t, it’s the fault of the PC vendor – not the hardware manufacturers or the OS.  A new computer should always “just work.”

Many anti-Linux individuals totally miss this point.  They wrongly assume that because they bought a PC with Windows on it and it “just worked,” Windows is a superior operating system.  How stupid is that?  It’s akin to saying “the stock tires that came with my car are superior because they just worked.”  No kidding, genius.  STOCK PARTS SHOULD ALWAYS “JUST WORK.”

Which leads into my next point.

In the example above, you did some homework before sticking a new engine into your car.  You carefully removed the old engine, taking note of where each belt, hose, and bolt went.  You probably made use of all of that information when installing the new engine.

Only an idiot would take the stock engine out of a car and drop in a new one and expect the car to “just work.”  Obviously, some hoses are going to need to be re-attached, some belts are going to need to be hooked up, etc.

Why should a computer be any different?  Thus, my second major point is:

It is not reasonable to drop a new OS onto a computer and expect it to “just work.”

I don’t care what you’ve heard about Windows or Linux – if you install a new operating system on a computer for which it was not SPECIFICALLY designed – and by specifically, I mean “specific down to every single piece of hardware” – there is a chance that you will need to do some manual tweaking.  Sometimes you may get lucky and have it “just work.”  But most of the time, regardless of OS, you will need to tie up a couple loose ends.  Such is life.

Now I know what some of you are thinking – “yeah, but I installed (insert OS here) on my computer and it just worked.”  If that’s the case, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.  Very, very few people can install an OS onto randomly assembled hardware and have it work on the first try.

Are you starting to get a clearer picture of things?  I hope so, because far too many people misunderstand this basic issue.

Now in order for this article to really get people pissed off, I now need to state a firm opinion on which operating system has the best hardware support.  (But if you’re here, you probably already know what I’m going to say.)

Hands down, the operating system with best hardware support is Linux.  In fact, no other OS comes anywhere close.  Not by a mile.

As you may have noticed from the link in the analogy above, Linux runs on almost 80% of the world’s supercomputers.  It also runs on an ever-growing number of servers.  Desktop Linux users number somewhere in the 15+ millions.  Some 90+% of the desktops and servers in Hollywood run on Linux.  Linux runs cellphones, traffic signals, election machines, satellites, military equipment, medical equipment, particle accelerators, digital cameras, TVs, DVD players, mp3 players, and many government systems.  If you’re interested in reading a huge list of specific uses for Linux, check out the bottom of this page.

Now impressive as this is, it really doesn’t apply to the everyday user.  After all, I’m not building my own particle accelerator or traffic signal.

So the real question for most users is – how well will Linux work for ME?

And the answer is, of necessity, vague.  No one can say for certain how well Linux will work for you.  You’ll just have to try it.

One of the problems with attempting to predict how well an OS will work on a particular set of PC hardware is that there are more possible hardware combinations in a modern computer than there are atoms in the universe.  (That isn’t an exaggeration, btw.)  And that’s just for major hardware – processor, motherboard, RAM, hard drive, video card, sound card, monitor, keyboard, mouse.  When you start factoring in optional hardware (like any of a million possible USB devices), the list of possible computer configurations quickly approaches numbers difficult to quantify.

So in reality, it is impossible to guarantee that a given OS will work on any system other than ones for which it has been specifically designed.

But I know, I know – this theoretical crap still doesn’t answer the core question of “will Linux work for me?”

For that, let me give you the best thing I’ve got – my own personal experience.

A Personal Experience

This Christmas I picked up a refurbished HP Pavilion Media Center PC.  The specs are similar to this, including:

• 2.8ghz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+
• 2gb RAM (667mhz DDR2)
• 500gb SATA hard drive, plus another 200gb SATA drive manually installed by me
• NVidia GeForce 9400GT video card
• Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS sound card with recording hub (pulled from my old PC)
• LightScribe DVD Burner
• Memory card reader (one of those 9-in-1 or 10-in-1 things)
• TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge 1600)
• The usual set of ports (6xUSB, 2xFirewire)

In addition, I’d be tying the PC into an existing monitor (22″ HP LCD), 5.1 surround speakers, Epson Stylus CX8400 printer/scanner/copier, an off-brand graphics tablet, and a webcam.

In all honesty, I consider this to be a pretty nasty adventure for any OS.  That’s an eclectic mix of hardware ranging from almost brand-new parts (the video card came out August 2008) to relatively old parts (my sound card was purchased in 2002).

As for an OS, because the system was refurbished it came without a pre-installed OS.  I made the choice to install Ubuntu 8.10 to the 500gb drive and Windows XP on the 200gb drive.

Here’s how it all went down.

Ubuntu 8.10:

By and large, Ubuntu 8.10 worked shockingly well.  I had to manually configure only the following three pieces of hardware:

• Hauppauge 1600 TV Tuner card (simple process using this set of excellent instructions)
• Epson printer/scanner/copier (my model is CX8400, to make it work you just have to select the CX7800 model – found that by a quick googling).
• Graphics tablet (using this guide)

Windows XP:

Unfortunately, Windows XP was a different story.  Upon install my ethernet refused to work – which obviously prevented me from using the internet to track down answers to my many hardware woes.

After some serious google-hunting on my laptop, I was finally able to track down an NVidia installer that got my ethernet working (apparently my ASUS motherboard used an NVidia chipset).  With that done, I could set about finding and installing drivers for the following devices:

• NVidia GeForce 9400GT (video card worked, but to change any of the settings and enable 3D acceleration I had to download and install specific drivers)
• TV Tuner Card (non-functional until I tracked down official Hauppauge drivers online; however, I don’t have any recording software, so the card is still technically useless).
• Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (sound worked, but to get surround sound I had to find the CD that came with the card and install specific drivers)
• Epson Stylus printer (printing worked, but to access printer-specific settings I had to find the CD that came with the card and install specific drivers)
• Graphics tablet (non-functional and drivers not available for download; fortunately, I had a Windows driver CD that came with the tablet – had I not had that CD, it would have been ugly…)
• Webcam (non-functional until I used my webcam installer CD).

After a lot of restarts (five, I think), I eventually got my XP install up and running.

My Final Point

My final point is this: with some determination, you can get both Windows and Linux to run on almost any hardware.  If you have driver CDs for every piece hardware, Windows should be fairly easy to install.  Linux is much more a function of googling, since very few hardware manufacturers include linux drivers on their included CDs.

In my case, installing Ubuntu 8.10 was a MUCH more pleasant experience than installing Windows XP.  Part of this is because Linux is specifically designed to be installed on random hardware.  Very few computers come pre-installed with Linux, and the guys writing Linux know this.  If you use Linux, odds are that you installed it yourself.  There is no manufacturer-based QA team that checks to ensure hardware compatibility.

Installing XP was ugly because XP is not really designed to be dumped onto untested computers.  Microsoft goes to great lengths to ensure that hardware manufacturers comply with Windows hardware-compatibility requirements, as well as requiring PC vendors to ensure that pre-installed (or OEM) copies of Windows are properly configured.  XP has very few drivers preconfigured, since they rely on hardware manufacturers to provide install CDs with their hardware.  Since my refurbished machine came with no install CDs, tracking down the proper XP drivers was a nightmare.

In Conclusion

So there – now you’ve seen at least one example where installing Windows was a hell of a lot harder than installing Linux (in the form of Ubuntu 8.10).  If you bought a computer with Windows pre-installed, chances are that it will work better “out of the box” than Linux will.  Don’t be surprised, and don’t fault Linux for that.  Besides – if you’re installing Linux solely for better hardware support, you may not know what you’re doing.

I for one think it’s well worth the effort to get Linux up and running, and not just because I’m an inane fanboy.  I like the general ease of setting up new hardware.  I love that a free program (called MythTV) allows me to use my new PC+tuner card as a DVR.  I love how quickly Ubuntu 8.10 starts and shuts down.  All of my most-used software (Firefox, OpenOffice, and GIMP) works on both Windows and Linux, but I find it much more responsive on Linux.  I much prefer the free Amarok player to Windows Media Player (or the abomination called iTunes).

For me, Linux makes using my home computer a much more enjoyable and productive experience.

Will it do the same for you?  I don’t know.  I’m not psychic.  Instead, head to www.ubuntu.com (or any other Linux distro’s homepage) and give Linux a try.

Just remember the analogy from the start of this article – like replacing the engine in a car, you may have to do a bit of work to get Linux working just the way you like it.

But once you have it working, you’ll realize it was absolutely worth the effort.

Related articles:

• Ubuntu vs. Vista: a comparison for the XP upgrader
• Linux, Day 2: Installation and Configuration
• Ubuntu 8.04: Taking the plunge
• Linux, Day 1: Picking a distro