Yesterday one of the volunteers at The Working Centre was helping me find and organize Windows 95 drivers. We came across a SOHOWare sfa110 network card that took 3 hours to properly configure under Windows. Now you might be tempted to think, geez, what a newbie, but even with TCP/IP properly installed, and 4 drivers, all of which were suppose to work, we couldn't get the darn thing going. Because the system had Windows 95 without USB support, we were using floppies, limiting our driver downloads to 1.44MB (we could have spanned floppies, but that could have turned into an even more collosal waste of time if one of the floppies in the set was bad).
I finally broke down and burned a copy of the multi-megabyte driver from SOHOWare, and after a couple more false starts, and needing to know what path things were stored at, we managed to get the driver working. In short, it took A LOT of effort!
Now I know I'm comparing apples and oranges when comparing Windows 95 and Linux, but only slightly. The machine in question wasn't capable of running Windows XP, at least not well. Had I put Debian GNU/Linux on the machine it would have picked up the SOHOWare card right away with a newer kernel. People always talk about how *easy* things are in Windows, forgetting minor irritants like the experience I just mentioned above. My point of all this is that Linux does have better hardware support than Windows. If you consider how badly XP would run on such a machine (64MB RAM), and the fact that installing the 95 driver is a royal PITA unless you waste a CD-R, installing a Linux distribution like Puppy Linux or Debian GNU/Linux seems like a breeze.
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