Are you serious? I had to reinstall Windows on my laptop the other day, but since I didn't have a Windows CD with me, I installed Ubuntu to use in the meantime

Are you serious? I had to reinstall Windows on my laptop the other day, but since I didn't have a Windows CD with me, I installed Ubuntu to use in the meantime until I got back home to reinstall Windows. Ubuntu worked fine out of the box and detected all the drivers perfectly, and the wireless worked fine. The battery life applet in particular was extremely nice, providing a watt-by-watt breakdown of power usage over time. To put it simply--everything Just Worked. Now, I had a huge number of pet peeves about 8.1 which I discovered soon after I installed it--but despite the various minor but annoying problems I had with it, it worked. So then I installed Windows when I got home, since that's the platform I develop on. It didn't have any LAN drivers, so I had to grab a USB thumbdrive to install those. Nor did it have wireless drivers. Or graphics drivers. Or sound drivers. Oh, and it bluescreened when it tried to install the webcam drivers, so I had to force it not to. It had basically nothing out of the box. It took me an entire day to get Windows working with a basic development environment, all my drivers, and all the latest updates. By comparison, this took 30 minutes on Ubuntu. Laptops seem to be Windows' week point with regards to drivers: it seems as if Microsoft has completely ignored them with regards to hardware support. Given this kind of experience, it's no wonder Linux is making inroads in the laptop market!