Kevanf1 wrote:
Then let's take a look at hardware comaptibility. If the hardware manufacturers wrote drivers for Linux then yes, it could be compared like for like with Microsoft software.
Funny you should mention that. Just today a work, I was installing Windows 2000 on a Toshiba notebook. Before I could do anything else, I had to download the ethernet and display drivers from Toshiba. Then, once I got the computer talking to the network, the next step was to get the latest updates & fixes from MS. That process barely started, when the computer became extremely slow. Even after rebooting, the computer performance was so painfully slow, that it was unusable! I wasn't able to install the updates. I've never seen that happen with Linux and in all the years I've been running Linux, I've only had to download one driver. That was for the "Winmodem" in my ThinkPad, when I was running RedHat 7.3 on it. Even that wasn't necessary in SuSE 9.0, 9 1 or 9.2.