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> other than printer drivers That's surprisingly important to the average user.

• bryanlarsen 13y ago
  There are also a good number of older printers out there that aren't supported by the latest versions of Windows but are supported in Linux. Some didn't make the jump to NT/XP, and some didn't make the jump to Vista/7/8.
  • jamesgeck0 13y ago
    My father seems to have the knack of buying printers and scanners that don't transition between Windows versions. I had no idea that printer drivers could break between Windows 7 and Windows 8, but they did. He began emailing documents to himself and printing from his Windows 7 laptop. About six months after Windows 8 was released, HP finally released a supposedly compatible driver for his printer. Upon installation of the driver, the system detected the same printer twice, and neither of the detected devices worked. Additionally, every application I tried printing from crashed as soon as the printer dialog appeared. The situation was resolved when we discovered that HP has a Windows 8 compatible generic postscript driver that works with just about everything.
• freehunter 13y ago
  There's one machine in my house that I could run Linux on full time. Unfortunately, that's the machine my printer is hooked up to, and Lexmark refuses to make a printer driver for Linux for that model. I didn't go out and buy a new printer, I reinstalled Windows.