I love how anti-linux advocates and windows fanbois always pick on Linux for hardware compatibility or rather lack of thereof. Just about every rant about Linux I have seen so far includes a gripe about it not supporting new or exotic hardware out of the box. Funny thing is that, neither does Windows.

Here is an experiment, and I encourage everyone to conduct it at their leisure. First, grab your Windows XP CD (preferably the one with SP2 slipstreamed in) and do a clean install on a formated drive. Once it is done, pull up the device manager and count the yellow question marks (these are the devices that failed to initialize because they are not supported out of the box). Try to figure out what they are (good luck on that), and write them down on a piece of paper. Once you do that, grab your favorite Linux distro (I recommend Ubuntu) and repeat the exercise. Once you have your Linux installed, run lshw or equivalent command and see how many of the devices from your “yellow question mark” list were detected and configured during the installation. I suspect that you will be able to cross of at least few of them from your list. Your results may vary.

I did this experiment several times