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Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

Having spent yesterday setting up a new laptop to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, Ubuntu works far, far better.

Windows needed drivers installing for everything from the network interface up. And I'm still having troubles with the network - I can use wifi fine, but the wired connection refuses to pick up an IP with DHCP.

Ubuntu on the other hand needed a single change to the boot parameters to make screen brightness adjustments work. (Windows also needed a driver for this). Otherwise it works perfectly.

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Are you saying Ubuntu has better driver support than Windows?

Without question - thats been true for a few years now.

I'm not the parent, but that has been my experience. Linux works better out of the box on my machine than Windows 7.

I think the point was that it frequently has a simpler install experience, which is true. It doesn't have better driver support for ATI video cards or Broadcom wifi cards.

Yes.

A million times yes.

About a month ago now, my laptop's windows install decided to take a dive so I reinstalled windows and took it as an opportunity to dual boot ubuntu as well. Ubuntu worked out of the box. I'm still finding things that need drivers a month later in windows.

I don't think this opinion can be based on personal experience. One or two computers, especially developers machines are a sample size too small. Also, I've had an opposite experiences. Not to mention that what we most notice is divergence from the past trend. Regardless, I don't think many hardware manufacturers prioritize Linux for their deployment. I can see, however, that since the latest Ubuntu image is at most 6 months old, it can have more built in, while Windows 7 is many years old now, tends to require 'Windows Update' to get all the latest drivers. Overall, however, I think Windows gets way more driver support just because of the market. I don't know how you can argue that.

Been my experience too. But I would like to point out, in October 2013, for the first time in my twenty year history of using Windows computers, Windows 7 managed to find the drivers for a piece of hardware I have, a usb soundcard, Online!

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