>Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant.
There's always been some flux to the ease of Linux vs the ease of say..Windows.
There was a time during XP SP1 and SP2 where installing Windows took fucking forever because it had none of the drivers pre-installed, whereas Linux had a grand majority of them bundled.
Windows still had better overall hardware support with peripherals, so there was still the odd thing missing - but if you had a compatible machine, you could do a clean linux install in under an hour and be loaded with apps, codecs, drivers, the works. With XP you would've been left scouring one web page after another for endless download links, often from another computer b/c your NIC driver didn't work out of the box.
There's always been some flux to the ease of Linux vs the ease of say..Windows.
There was a time during XP SP1 and SP2 where installing Windows took fucking forever because it had none of the drivers pre-installed, whereas Linux had a grand majority of them bundled.
Windows still had better overall hardware support with peripherals, so there was still the odd thing missing - but if you had a compatible machine, you could do a clean linux install in under an hour and be loaded with apps, codecs, drivers, the works. With XP you would've been left scouring one web page after another for endless download links, often from another computer b/c your NIC driver didn't work out of the box.