I regularly used knoppix (a popular live-cd linux distro) to download windows drivers from manufacturer websites after windows was installed but before it could connect to the internet. Some users would need a separate computer to download windows drivers to a floppy/cd/thumb drive. Ironically I’ve often had more trouble installing windows since the network drivers had to be manually installed. Of course this is just anecdotal evidence, but even so it’s important to remember that experienced linux users don’t just select hardware at random and if you select supported hardware you’ll naturally have a much better experience. In my experience in trying linux on haphazardly supplied computers, more than half worked.
It’s easy to cherry pick parts to push the narrative that “Linux doesn’t work on older hardware”, but that doesn’t mean it is representative. It could be interesting if you could cite a scientifically credible study, but your sample size of 1 isn’t statistically significant to your claim.
When a Linux user can show me a driver from say Ubuntu 6 that you can download from the web and drop into Ubuntu whatever number they are up to now? THEN we can talk about it being a windows replacement.īecause as it is now I would argue its really more of a MacOS replacement except those with the money to buy the latest and greatest hardware, IE Mac users? Really do not want it, and the odds are if your hardware isn’t supported by Windows anymore the Linux support will be worse.
This is what always drove me nuts about the Linux crowd, the easily disproved myth of “Linux supports more hardware” which it can easily be proven doesn’t because its lack of a stable ABI means a driver that worked yesterday may not work today, meanwhile I have sound cards from the WinXP era running perfectly fine with full surround sound on Win10-thanks to backwards compatibility. want an example? Find me a driver that will give me hardware acceleration for the first gen AMD APUs on Linux…go on I’ll wait…you can’t, they don’t exist.Īnd there is already a hack that will let you bypass the system reqs for win 11 (and I’m sure one that will let you bypass the reqs for 12 when it comes out) but thanks to Linux refusing to have a standard ABI drivers for Linux only last as long as some poor schmuck is willing to constantly rewrite them for the latest kernel. Opera Beta is a great way to safely road-test upcoming features in this slimline and powerful browser without affecting your existing, stable installation.Except Linux doesn’t work on older hardware either, so its a moot point. You’ll be able to differentiate between stable and developmental build by the colour of the program icon: Opera’s icon remains red, while Opera Beta's icon is silver grey, meaning it’ll be safe for even relatively inexperienced users to try out new features before they become generally available. And because Opera Beta updates as soon as the latest development build is released, you can keep checking back regularly to see what’s up and coming and whether the bugs you’ve encountered have been fixed yet. The reasoning is simple: you get to try out the new features without affecting your existing installation, so if the developmental version is too buggy for your tastes, you can use your tried and trusted version, no problem. Opera is no exception, and Opera Beta (previously known as Opera Next) adopts the same approach to Firefox Beta in providing a completely separate installation of the latest unstable version of Opera for people to road-test without affecting their day-to-day browsing. Nowadays, it’s de rigueur for browser manufacturers to speed up development, which means opening up less stable builds to the masses in order to get them bug-checked as quickly as possible. The days when major browser updates were few and far between are over.