Some time back (I think a few months or so now), I'd switched my desktop OS from Microsoft's abominable Windows XP (eXtra Polish/eXtra Plasticky, add your own jibe here), to the rather more enjoyable Ubuntu 5.10. Some of the things that I've noticed about this Ubuntu (it's the 1st one I've ever used), is that unlike XP, the TV card works streight away, without any drivers, in fact, the only thing that it needed was XAWTV, which installed without a hitch. Bluetooth also worked perfectly, without any drivers required. Normally what I'd do is to install KDE, or set it as my default (it doesn't come in the regular flavour of Ubuntu, only in KUbuntu, by default), I've noticed though, that unlike the demented Red Hat Linux 7.2 that I once tried to install (with which the audio support didn't work, neither did USB, or even the motherboard's onboard 8-bit speaker, or onboard NIC, GNOME put my graphics adapter into a resolution that was hardly usable, and was 'speckled' - the graphics adapter being the ATI Radeon 9000 that I've had installed for ages, KDE was much easier to use though), Ubuntu properly supports my graphics adapter with pretty much all of the obscure desktop environments I've thrown at it, actually
works with my USB and onboard AC'97 audio chip, and vitally, Ubuntu actually works with my onboard Ethernet NIC (a pretty much bog-standard Realtek Fast Family (or whatever it's called) onboard NIC), and also the 3Com NIC that I replaced the WinModem with, not knowing at the time that the onboard NIC hadn't been damaged after the brilliant blue spark, that I saw from it's port.
With XP, I would have needed, after a fresh install from the i386 folder that sat on my primary NTFS partition, to dig out the set of 6 CDs containing the drivers for my system, look through the various self-extracting archives, that HP lovingly tossed randomly onto each CD (which made it difficult to find the drivers for the onboard USB 2.0, so that it would work at full speed, and not at the USB 1.0 speed, it also takes a while to find the rather obscure DLA packet writing DVD+RW/CD-RW driver, which will produce a disc that won't work in Linux, leaving me to either find a system running Windows XP and a copy of DLA (of which there's only one in the house), or set up a VMware virtual machine on Linux, with a copy of XP and DLA, just to read a DVD+RW that I've recorded, in order to actually have a music collection.) I would also need to install the drivers for the USB Bluetooth adapter that I have, twice (once, whilst installing the supporting software, and once again, after connecting it). I even had to install the graphics adapter drives, along with the useless extensions that it adds to the 'Display' control panel, and also had to install the AC'97 drivers, in order to even get audio. In fact, the only thing that I couldn't get to work without additional drivers, was the HP OfficeJet all-in-one that's lying around.
