On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 3:27 AM, Ganesan Venkata Subramanian <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all > > Please read and comment... > > http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/locutus/washing-the-windows-myths-device-support-38896 >
What he says is in a way true. But as with any such advocacy/ant-advocacy article a lot depends on the interpretation of terms. When he says "Windows driver support" he means "how much hardware windows will detect during install" That depends on the Windows Installation CD you use. If you use the original release it supports few, the later releases with SP1,SP2,SP3 etc integrated will detect more. And if you use a windows CD customized with software such as http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html it will detect even more :-) When a windows advocate says Windows had more support he means "for almost any x86/amd64 hardware there is driver available either from Microsoft or from the hardware vendors themselves" i.e if you bought it you can use it! The advantage of Windows is that Hardware Vendors support Windows :-) But these days you see the problem with that kind of a support model. You need to do circus to install Windows XP on newer machines because it does not detect even the hard disks some times. And the vendors don't care about releasing drivers for XP :-) They are after the latest from Microsoft. But BSDs and Linux does it the the user friendly way. Users need not know anything Just install the OS and everything is in there. It is fun to see the expression on the face of windows only users when you throw the driver CDs and floppies into the waste bin :-) But the problem here is limited support some times especially when the hardware vendor does not release documentation of their hardware. FreeBSD tried to solve this by using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper to some extend. If the hardware vendors co-operated and released documentation for their hardware BSDs and Linux will be far ahead of Windows in terms of driver support. But even then you see the resolve of some developers to re-engineer and write drivers for these closed hardware so we can use them. I guess out of all the BSDs and Linux Distros OpenBSD has more x86/amd64/sparc/sparc64 architecture hard ware support. Some of my devices which Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD wont detect is supported well on OpenBSD. A lot of reverse engineering is also done by OpenBSD developers and a lot of drivers which Linux developers have written have been used as reference material in the absence of hardware Documentation. Windows NT used to support Alpha and x86 architecture but later they dropped alpha support though they support amd64 now. Linux has a very big list of architecture support compared to windows :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_supported_architectures And NetBSD beats them all! http://www.netbsd.org/ports/ So any comparison of Windows vs BSDs and Linuxes is limited to one architecture namely x86 :-) and x86/amd64 is not the end of the world :-) --Siju _______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected]
