I've actually done this recently...by accident.
I had a newly built system that I accidentally booted up with an antique Knoppix LiveCD from 2002.
It saw my new Lexmark Laser printer, the Intel gigabit network card and the nVidia video card just fine.
Did you have the same network this guy had? The guy needed to do an apples to apples test. None of his criticism means anything without proof that 7 year old Linux handled installing on that machine better.