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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

I literally can't remember the last time I had driver issues in Ubuntu. The last time I had one in Linux at ALL was early Raspberry Pi builds that didn't include Broadcom drivers. And even that was easy to fix.

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Ubuntu 12.10 still doesn't recognise my external Dell monitor which works without hitch in OSX. That aside, upgrading seems to have gone smoothly.

'OSX' being the operative term here. Windows is an entirely different kettle of fish. If your hardware is considered too outmoded or somehow slipped by the Windows driver dragnet, you're SOL. There are very few times I have installed Windows and _not_ had to go to another computer to get the network/wifi driver onto a USB (or CD!) and transfer it to the Windows machine so I can get the rest of the missing drivers.

Having 'Device Manager' full of yellow question marks is _common_, even in Windows 7. http://i.imgur.com/zembU.jpg Anyone who thinks otherwise either has kept their Driver CDs, has the original installation still on the machine, or is just plain lucky

A friend of mine was so sick of the XP installer's failure to do network cards that he made a 'super-installer' .iso which was the basic XP installer plus 676 different network card drivers. "This CD will find your network card under XP".

haha, nice! What a joke. This happens even on Windows 7. Granted, I have only had it happen on Windows XP/Vista-era machines, but yeah, I guess the point is that Ubuntu pulls it off without a hassle in most cases

It's not recognising a monitor? That sounds more like Dell doing something very wrong, rather than Linux.

This diagnosis is exactly correct and completely useless to the user, and is the hallmark of the Linux hardware experience.

That sounds like a corrupted EDID on your monitor. dmesg probably spits out some useful errors. OS X is more forgiving of bad EDID checksums, I believe.

Printer drivers seem to be the main one for me, I have a canon network inkjet all-in-one and a xerox 8560. The Canon I finally located the Linux network print and scan drivers finally on a UK or AU Canon site (which had an easy to fix glitch in the install file, Google around - you'll find them). For the 8560 had to get the Windows PPD from the Xerox site as the Linux drivers section was inaccessible and the pre-installed CUPS one didn't recognize paper handling. Still get a constant "printer is out of ink" warning - but it prints.

When it comes to laptops number one becomes the wireless card.

I usually avoid video issues by making sure the computer has an nvidia card or laptop has an nvidia chipset- learned my lesson there.

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