Originally posted by yotambien
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Both Windows and Linux are problematic in this area.
The problem with Windows is that drivers are developed by third parties and then almost never updated. So if you want to run your scanner from 2000 on Windows 7, chances are great that it won't work anymore. You can say that Windows has a stable ABI, but that's not true in practice.
The problem with Linux is that there is a lot of hardware, and not all of them have a Linux driver. However, once some piece of hardware does have a driver in the kernel, it will be supported indefinitely.
So what you see is that current hardware on a modern Windows system will usually work better than on Linux. But older hardware will stop working on Windows while it continues to work on Linux.
And what happens when old hardware doesn't run on Windows? It gets thrown out. It is 'too old'. What happens when hardware doesn't run on Linux? Linux gets thrown out.
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