Brain Handles

I wouldn't really call myself a Linux critic, as there are many good things I could say about it, but I have regularly criticized it for one particular shortcoming... not having the hardware support Windows does.

Now, this is not necessarily a failing of Linux itself, so much as it is a failing of the hardware manufacturers who refuse to create Linux drivers or release hardware specs so the Linux community can create drivers. But no matter who you pin the blame on, when you install Linux, it can be a crapshoot getting your hardware to work (which currently seems to be a complaint being leveled against Windows Vista too).

Generally when you're not using bleeding edge hardware, the problems are minor. It's a matter of finding the right video driver, codecs for your media player, a driver for your wireless LAN chipset, stuff like that. But it's those niggling little problems that consume extra time that I've cited as why many people won't find Linux ready for prime time on the desktop... until now.

Yesterday, after reading how weak a level of protection WEP encryption was on a wireless network, I decided to switch all the computers in the house to WPA-PSK. It took all of 5 minutes to swap the router, my late-2006 MacBook Pro and my wife's mid-2005 Sony Vaio laptop. Then came my early-2003 Compaq Presario 2525US laptop that we keep downstairs as mainly a web browser.

It didn't support or recognize WPA. My choices were WEP or nothing.

I Googled around and found a Microsoft knowledgebase article on upgrading to WPA. I read it, downloaded the hotfix, installed it, and rebooted. Nada. I tried to make sure the hotfix was installed, reinstalled it for good measure, rebooted... nada. I went to Compaq's site and found multiple drivers for the wireless chipset. Apparently midway through the production run, they changed chipsets. Digging around and finding mine, I found that the driver predated the Windows update that added WPA support.

Problem was, that was the most recent driver Compaq offered. On a machine they'd sold up through the end of 2003, the wireless driver was from early 2002 and was never updated to accomodate WPA. Whether this was pure laziness or planned obsolence, I'm not sure, but unless I could find a new driver released by the chipset manufacturer (since Compaq didn't give a hoot), it looked like I was going to buy a Wi-Fi card to replace the laptop's built-in Wi-Fi or junk the laptop.

I hunted around on Google a bit more and found, oddly enough, a Fujitsu driver for a different brand of wireless chipset that used the same wireless chips, and which some Compaq users were reporting worked great (and some were reporting it broke their wireless altogether). Well, if it didn't fix the onboard wireless LAN, I was going to have to buy a plug-in card anyway, so when Windows warned that this driver might break my hardware, I didn't have much to lose and ignored the warning.

I went into the wireless security settings, it asked for my WPA key and connected to my network. I rebooted and let it go from start-up and everything worked clean. Later that night, when my wife switched on the machine so she could browse the web while she watched TV (she's a multi-tasker), she didn't notice anything different, and I didn't bother to mention that I'd sacrificed nearly three hours I could have spent working on money-making projects to make the Compaq laptop support WPA.

Now I'll still never use SUSE Linux, because I believe the folks at SUSE are a bunch of rip-off artists (why I hate SUSE). But when it comes to hardware support differences between other Linux distributions and Windows, I'm no longer giving the edge to Windows. It's not necessarily because Linux has continued to improve in terms of the depth and breadth of its hardware driver support (although it has), but because I've now seen firsthand how getting hardware to work right under Windows can be just as arcane and time-consuming as I've ever found it to be under Linux.

So, is Linux ready for the desktop? Its at least as ready as Windows is, if not more.