Windows is cleaning up a lot of legacy drivers. A bunch of printers (+ scanners) that predate updates to the printer driver framework in recent versions of windows just don't have functioning drivers anymore, despite being perfectly functional.
All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.
Most devices that you can buy for under $400 now run on ARM chips (frequently Mediatek). We're talking tablets (with keyboards), convertibles, even outright laptops (i.e. "netbooks"). These things qualify as computers. They are replacing traditional laptops, just as those replaced desktops.
If we're looking at sub-$400 computers, especially on ARM, it seems like we have to include the large segment of ChromeOS devices that only run Linux out of the box (or at all, generally).
Most devices in that class I see run some vendor flavor of Android or ChromeOS and not Windows, so definitionally speaking they do run Linux out of the box.
There is only one area where windows excels: recent PC-based hardware. For everything else, primarily including anything that is not PC, and anything that is from more than a decade and a half or so ago, Linux is miles ahead, and there's no discussion possible.
Whether this is any helpful to us is another story.
Windows is cleaning up a lot of legacy drivers. A bunch of printers (+ scanners) that predate updates to the printer driver framework in recent versions of windows just don't have functioning drivers anymore, despite being perfectly functional.
All these devices work out of the box on linux, more or less.
Most devices that you can buy for under $400 now run on ARM chips (frequently Mediatek). We're talking tablets (with keyboards), convertibles, even outright laptops (i.e. "netbooks"). These things qualify as computers. They are replacing traditional laptops, just as those replaced desktops.
And they do not run Linux out of the box.
If we're looking at sub-$400 computers, especially on ARM, it seems like we have to include the large segment of ChromeOS devices that only run Linux out of the box (or at all, generally).
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Most devices in that class I see run some vendor flavor of Android or ChromeOS and not Windows, so definitionally speaking they do run Linux out of the box.
2 replies →
There is only one area where windows excels: recent PC-based hardware. For everything else, primarily including anything that is not PC, and anything that is from more than a decade and a half or so ago, Linux is miles ahead, and there's no discussion possible.
Whether this is any helpful to us is another story.