Ah, a Windows guy. Yes, this is VERY common with Microsoft operating systems. Much less so with other operating systems.
No what he said was HIS hardware had some issues which were easily solved with provided disks with ZERO attempt to find out if an equivalent version of Linux would or would not have similar problems.
That's just the point. Linux doesn't require "extra disks." The hardware is either supported or not. Ethernet has always been supported.
XP requires extra fiddling to get the most basic of things to work.
That's the whole point of the article.
I’ve used Macs, Unix, VMS, tons of stuff. I make my money in front of Windows machines but I know other OSes just fine.
No the point is he threw a 7 year old OS a new hardware that might or might not follow the PnP standards of 7 years ago and it didn’t work. He didn’t bother to find out if there was a problem with this hardware and any other 7 year old OS so we can’t possibly know where the problem was. He, and you, just ass-u-med it must be XP’s fault. And then he lied about the general availability of driver disks to make his problem sound bigger.