On Sat, 16 Feb 2019 11:04:38 +0000, RobH wrote:

snip

Also there is one current flavour of Windows and there is a virtual
guarantee at the end you will have a working PC. Although the drivers I
mentioned may have to be installed.

The same is not true for Linux.

Linux Ubuntu

Is that like 'Robin Reliant' or are you 'foreign (where some languages
swap the word order around)?

has nearly all the drivers I need,

Out Of The Box you mean? Yeah, most recent Linux distros have most of
the basic drivers you need and often some of the extra (like for
printers).

and the ones it doesn't
can be downloaded and installed.

They can but how easily for most users, struggling to fix stuff
themselves?

Eg, say you need a driver for something under both Windows and Linux.

For Windows you go to the relevant web site and more often than not
you will find a Downloads section and in that either a list of
products or even a utility that will detect what of that brand
products you have installed / connected and get and install the
drivers for you. Even if it doesn't, the driver is likely to be a
single exe file that just runs and works.

For Linux, the same website is likely to offer nothing for Linux or
direct you so some 'special needs' 'give this a try and good luck'
link or generic driver that you have to install manually and / or
compile yourself (without giving line by line instructions how).

Or some Github bizarre / lucky-click page that may or may not give you
something you want.

It's like all (most) Linux people have never actually met ordinary
non-computer-literate / interested people who just want to get on with
their day, not take up some obscure hobby (or even have a basement to
do so in, had they wanted). ;-)

I have been building, installing, upgrading and maintaining PC's both
commercially and informally for friends and family since the 80's and
have NEVER struggled with getting an OS to work (fully) than I have
with the little I have played with Linux. And that's part of the
problem of course, I haven't (and don't want to) 'study Linux in the
same way I haven't and didn't 'study' MSDOS, CPM, OS/2, Windows or
even OSX, yet I typically found all of them much easier to work with
because (excluding MSDOS etc), you didn't generally have to conjure up
un-intuitive CLI gobbledygook to be able to do stuff.

And even then I typically could, I could create a basic autoexec.bat
or config.sys direct from the terminal or edit an .ini file but Linux
... with all it's bizzare file structures and 'you can't do this here'
restrictions (even though you just installed the thing) getting in the
way.

I'm sure it's all logical to someone used to any *nix or used to
having to program / run stuff from the CLI, just to get simple things
to work but that ain't 'most people'.

So, I install Windows and see something hasn't been fully configured
in device manager, the chances are a Windows Update will fix most /
all of that. If it doesn't I can generally use plain English (on
websites) and the mouse to fix it.

With Linux this long term PC builder will give it a go ... do some
Googling and hope to stumble upon someone who has posted an accurate /
up-to-date step-by-step walk through that I can copy/paste into my
version of that distro with that DE on my hardware and hope it works
for me also.

If it doesn't, I don't bother asking Linux geeks for help as their
version of what might help isn't generally the same as mine (because
it rarely helps), so will just re-install the Windows the hardware was
'designed for'.

I wish it wasn't still like this (and it is getting better) as I
really would like to make use of this free (of cost, I'm not
interested in any other type of 'free') especially if it's supposed to
be 'better' (safer / faster etc)?

Cheers, T i m