Finally, I mentioned at the top of this section that most of us deal with Vista as a preload and will probably install Ubuntu manually. That said, it is possible to buy a computer through some PC vendors with Ubuntu preloaded. System76, for instance, offers Ubuntu 6.10 as a standard preload, and some of the other major vendors (Dell, for instance) are making noises that they might start offering some distribution of Linux as an option. It's not clear whether they'll offer Ubuntu, but it's one of the better candidates
The Winner: |
Ubuntu has a slight edge here, if only because it can be run directly from the CD and tried out non-destructively. |
Hardware And PnP Support
Ubuntu makes it far easier to deal with hardware than previous, less user-friendly versions of Linux did, but only up to a point. The most common types of hardware and usage scenarios are handled the best, but the further you drift from that, the more complicated it gets. At its worst, Ubuntu's way of dealing with hardware often involves manual hacking to accomplish things that ought to be trivial (and in Windows usually are).
Vista's way of dealing with hardware is pretty centralized -- the Device Manager lets you browse all the installed hardware in a system, manage each device's driver and configuration, and so on. Ubuntu has a device manager, but it's just a static list, and can't be used for configuring devices per se. To do that, you often need to edit a configuration file, and the exact file to edit may depend on the type of device.
Ubuntu Linux
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Windows Vista
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view the image gallery |
view the image gallery |
The way printers are handled in Ubuntu can also be tricky, but I think this part says at least as much about hardware makers as anything else. In my case, I was using the HP LaserJet 1000, which uses a non-standard protocol that had to be reverse-engineered by Linux users to make it useable in that OS. Ubuntu had drivers for it, but they didn't work -- I had to dig around in the Ubuntu wiki for information, then download and compile a properly-updated set of drivers before I could print. Vista, by contrast, simply used the existing XP drivers provided by Hewlett-Packard (since no Vista drivers are available).