Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

And don't forget that the Intel drivers are still slow, buggy , and unstable. Realistically your least bad choice is probably the Nvidia proprietary driver if you want fast, stable, relatively bug-free video.

This situation actually really is worse than it was ten years ago for the hardware I own. As is the audio situation, which seems to have regressed to around 1995. Xorg configuration has the potential to be better now, except that distributions no longer seem to come with a sample that you can edit, and they've been doing away with the configuration tools - you need to configure less, but it's harder to do so.

And let's not forget that Mandrake had supermount by around 2000, which provided exactly the CDROM behaviour everyone wanted but wasn't considered the 'right thing', so we *still* have the worst automounting of any desktop OS.