I got a great story for you guys...

[spotdog14]

So a little background, I have been running Ubuntu since Edgy as my primary OS. So we dont print a lot of stuff so we dont keep a printer upstairs (its in the basement disconnected) and both the wife and I have laptops. So she needed to print something this weekend and brings the printer up tries to connect it to her XP Pro laptop, cant seem to find the drivers, downloads the ungodly large drivers from HP (54 mb for the "basic" driver) tries to install and fails, i try the same thing and fails. She gets mad and goes and does something else for a while, comes back after a few restarts and the driver still fails to install.

She then asks me if she can print it from my computer, I say sure. I get up plug the printer in, go to printers to add the printer and it auto detects the printer, installs the drivers and immediately alerts me to the fact that its low on ink, so I try to print a test page and it barely makes it!

Needless to say she wasnt to happy, but the question after that was "why doesn't my computer just work...." hahhah! I am going to burn a live cd and have her try out Ubuntu, she has been resistant until now to do it, but since I showed her that Office works under wine (yes I know openoffice is good, I use it every day, but you know) she might be more inclined to switch.

 

[heatlesssun]

If you think that's a good story I can tell you about a few weekends I tried getting some bluetooth headphones working in Ubuntu 8.04 last year.

I can't remember the last time I had a problem installing a printer driver in Windows but HP drivers can be a little funky. Brother drivers rock!

 

[/dev/null]

If you think that's a good story I can tell you about a few weekends I tried getting some bluetooth headphones working in Ubuntu 8.04 last year.

I can't remember the last time I had a problem installing a printer driver in Windows but HP drivers can be a little funky. Brother drivers rock!

QFT. Brother is pretty good (although not perfect) with linux support. I have a 7820N that has been almost flawlessless outside of printing slowly...

 

[Carlosinfl]

Great story. As I read this I saw a new marketing commercial for kids picking a PC over Mac @ store....sigh

 

[Arainach]

Try using a version of Windows that isn't 8 years old if you want to make a fair comparison.

 

[Shaggy3zx]

I recently had the same experience. Tried to get my lexmark working with Vista x64 and gave up after trying all the drivers I could find. Oh well...this printer works like a champ with #!

 

[:LJ:]

Try using a version of Windows that isn't 8 years old if you want to make a fair comparison.

Vista or Win7 make absolutely no difference - except that you have to click a few more times to keep UAC at bay. You still have to install proprietary drivers, which involves shoving the CD in and waiting half an hour while it installs all sorts of shit on your machine.

 

[heatlesssun]

Vista or Win7 make absolutely no difference - except that you have to click a few more times to keep UAC at bay. You still have to install proprietary drivers, which involves shoving the CD in and waiting half an hour while it installs all sorts of shit on your machine.

What a driver installs has NOTHING to with Windows or Linux for that matter, that's all on the driver developer and I'll take Windows driver support over Linux driver support any day.

 

[:LJ:]

What a driver installs has NOTHING to with Windows or Linux for that matter, that's all on the driver developer and I'll take Windows driver support over Linux driver support any day.

This is not a question of who is technically superior or whatever fanboy crap is coming out. It's a question of the user experience - which is, from the OP's perspective (and mine, as it happens), better on Linux.

 

[x-naga]

In the paste 5-8 years driver support has definitely been improved for unix/linux/bsd os's. Back in 2000 I used to dread adding a new video card, or any new peice of hardware. Hopefully now everything can be automated like in your printer story.

But it IS true, that Windows is and will be the main OS to develop for, with Mac OSX secondary, and Linux at the bottom of the priority list. That's why standardized and universal drivers are a must.

 

[RavenD]

Have you ever looked at your list of printers after connecting to a network that has a shared or LAN printer? Functions exactly the same as when you plug a usb cable with the printer in.

 

[Arainach]

This is not a question of who is technically superior or whatever fanboy crap is coming out. It's a question of the user experience - which is, from the OP's perspective (and mine, as it happens), better on Linux.

The OP doesn't even HAVE a perspective. He compared a current Linux distro to an EIGHT YEAR OLD Windows system. Driver support is 95% age; you can't have support for stuff that came out after the OS was released. If he wants to do a fair comparison, he'll have to try it against Vista or 7.

 

[:LJ:]

The OP doesn't even HAVE a perspective. He compared a current Linux distro to an EIGHT YEAR OLD Windows system. Driver support is 95% age; you can't have support for stuff that came out after the OS was released. If he wants to do a fair comparison, he'll have to try it against Vista or 7.

Actually, the native XP drivers were updated with Microsoft's latest in SP3 (released in Q2 2008), so that makes it a 1yr old driver bundle. Seems like a fair comparison to me.

 

[/dev/null]

The OP doesn't even HAVE a perspective. He compared a current Linux distro to an EIGHT YEAR OLD Windows system. Driver support is 95% age; you can't have support for stuff that came out after the OS was released. If he wants to do a fair comparison, he'll have to try it against Vista or 7.

Sure you can.

Keep distro, install new kernel, have new driver support.

Enjoy!

 

[SmokeRngs]

The OP doesn't even HAVE a perspective. He compared a current Linux distro to an EIGHT YEAR OLD Windows system. Driver support is 95% age; you can't have support for stuff that came out after the OS was released. If he wants to do a fair comparison, he'll have to try it against Vista or 7.

I'm guessing you wanted to post this drivel so you completely and totally ignored the fact that the OP stated very clearly that he went to HP's website and downloaded the drivers for the printer and tried to install them.

While the OP didn't state how old the printer is, I'm guessing it isn't brand new which would make it more likely that there were drivers for XP. Just because the OS doesn't have built in drivers doesn't mean there aren't drivers for the OS.

That all said, I do have much better driver support in Linux for "older" hardware. I have an older webcam and scanner which work fine with drivers I install in XP but don't function at all in Vista or 7. However, both things work just fine without installing drivers for it in Linux.

 

[spotdog14]

I'm guessing you wanted to post this drivel so you completely and totally ignored the fact that the OP stated very clearly that he went to HP's website and downloaded the drivers for the printer and tried to install them.

While the OP didn't state how old the printer is, I'm guessing it isn't brand new which would make it more likely that there were drivers for XP. Just because the OS doesn't have built in drivers doesn't mean there aren't drivers for the OS.

That all said, I do have much better driver support in Linux for "older" hardware. I have an older webcam and scanner which work fine with drivers I install in XP but don't function at all in Vista or 7. However, both things work just fine without installing drivers for it in Linux.

My printer was two years old, I attempted to use the Windows drivers first before downloading the HP drivers, but the device manager said that it could not find any drivers for that specific model.

I'm just saying, here was an example. To be fair her computer has a few issues, my favorite is when I am using it and explorer.exe stops and the task bar goes away... I asked her how often that happens and she said "oh yah that happens a lot" then I try to fix it and she doesnt want me to touch her computer. Which is fine with me because I have to deal with that stuff every day at work.

 

[jhstuckey]

What a driver installs has NOTHING to with Windows or Linux for that matter, that's all on the driver developer and I'll take Windows driver support over Linux driver support any day.

It does if the driver is built-in to the linux kernel.