But more importantly, I suspect that one of the things that prompted my move was also upgrading one of my PC’s to Windows Vista, and finding that my 18 month old Sony laptop didn’t have full drivers for everything. Although the Microsoft-supplied video drivers worked, they don’t support OpenGL – and the Nvidia drivers (which do) were flaky. Part of the sound hardware had no driver. The MemoryStick reader had no driver. A couple of months after Vista’s release, not all of these have been fixed.

And all of these were things which had perfectly good working drivers in Linux. The irony that a commercially-developed operating system from the world’s leading software vendor had worse driver support than something put together by thousands of coders working independently wasn’t lost on me

Addressing one point you make about video driver support, Nvidia’s Linux drivers certainly seem to be in a better state than their Vista drivers. In Ubuntu 7.04, all I needed to do to use them was check a box in the Restricted driver manager, let it download and install, and that was it – pretty simple. And the only reason I even bothered with that was because Second Life refuses to run with it – otherwise the default, open source driver would have been my preferred option.

Anyway, this comment is getting too long – I’ll write a post instead