I recently purchased Mandrake 7 from a local computer store and I'll get straight to the point - these are the things that do not work:
No printer - I have a Lexmark 3200 colour jet printer, but I haven't found a way to make it work with Linux.
No sound - Sometimes I can't even access my kmix, it says "... blah, blah, blah... no permission ... do a chmod a+rw /dev/mixer to change the ..." that didn't work, so I don't have sound. I have an ESS 1868 sound card.
No modem - I have a supraexpress 56i Pro but I'm yet to find a driver for it.
So I ask you, what good is Linux if 90% of the worlds home computer using population have un supported hardware?????
I mean come on, my printer doesn't work so I can't do any work on it, my sound doesn't work so I can't listen to anything, my modem doesn't work so I can't browse with it. I'm also not going to install network adapters on it, chances are that even though some say it is supported it won't be on my machine. Most people might get Linux because of the kewl interface or to leran unix but I will tell you this, if you want GUI's that look like Linux, get a different shell for you Windows OS, something like Litestep, also if you want to get a unix machine on your computer then get software that transforms your dos into one, I use one thats called Dos2Bash - Now I have a windows OS with the same look and feel as a Linux, and I have all my original programs. If you want this stuff go to
www.litestep.net
So if you haven't got Linux yet and your wondering whether to get it, then I would suggest you do not, simple as that.