A few reasons why most people don't use Linux.

[#1]

Ok, to get back to topic again. I have had an interesting time playing about with phpsysinfo. By default it includes cache in the memory usage and to anyone who does not understand how linux uses ram it would appear that I did not have enough as it was completely filling up. Bit of an effort not to include it and to display the memory usage minus what was being used for the cache. Had to get down and dirty with the php but I am happy with the result.
I also wanted to display the actual machine hostname but not the internal IP address which was not a default option. Have now managed to display the hostname with the external IP as I wanted. I could not sit down and write php but I am able to understand and change it for things like this.
Result http://www.seanbranagh.ie/info

[#2]

Very interesting Sean
Great hostname by the way, hope you'll call the next one tache or beard 

[#3]

On the original topic, I have alway found open source systems (various flavours of GNU/Linux, NetBSD, Solaris) to be much better at picking up my hardware. In fact I don't think I've ever had to install a separate driver for anything, including things like soundcards which XP didn't pick up. I guess it depends on the hardware as I don't have anything obscure. And the Solaris example as cheating as I've only ever installed it on Sun hardware.
I think a few years ago hardware support wasn't as good as it could be but it's very unusual these days to have something a modern GNU/Linux system doesn't pick up.
And on side topics, phpsysinfo is pretty good, I prefer lshw for getting hardware info as it tells you a bunch more information. It's a different tool (i.e. you run it on the command line and read the output once, rather than it dynamically updating for other people to see) but it's worth remembering.

[#4]

My apologies for veering off topic.
It would appear that onboard components seem to get support far more quickly than external devices for obvious reasons, I suppose i also depends what hardware the volunteers to the project are running.
I understand from a colleague that Creative were rather reluctant to either create a linux driver or open source the source code for quite a long time but that could have also had something to do with their relationship with Redmond.

[#5]

Strange thing though. CentOS does as I would expect. The older version (4.7) does support my older hardware but the newer version (5.2) no longer has the suppurt for the old hardware. Debian on the other hand was the opposite. Debian 4 did not support the hardware in the same computer but Debian 5 did?
The hardware I am talking about does appear to be most or all PCI devices as the graphics card (not needed anyway), onboard raid card and a selection of network cards were not supported.

[#6]

Quote from: techguy

Very interesting Sean Great hostname by the way, hope you'll call the next one tache or beard

Yes, there is a story behind the names of all of my computers. The other ones are called:
"Streethawk"
"Mobil1" (Laptop)
"Atticserver" I suppose there is no real story behind this.
"Other"

[#7]

Different kernel version? Drivers are part of the kernel, so if that is updated thye might change. Doesn't explain why they would drop support for some devices, though, unless it is just to save space on supporting old and obscure hardware.

[#8]

When something gets so old that it's a museum piece, you have to delete it.
If you've millions of bits of obscure code to check, you'd never get a new kernel update out.

[#9]

And I thought the biggest thing about Linux was it would run on just about anything.

[#10]

It can, but if you choose to use one of the pre-built distributions, as the majority of us probably do, then your choices are inevitably constrained by choices that have been made by whoever created the distribution. Who may, or may not, include support for specific hardware as they think fit.
However, you need not be constrained. You are free to replace any components used in a distribution with alternative components if you so wish. The complexity of doing this can vary from trivial to extreme depending on what you want to try to do. Components with different features or alternative versions of components are often available on the web, either from the creator of your distribution or from other sources, and you can even make your own if you have the ability to write the software.
You would, of course, need an appropriate level of knowledge and skills to do any this successfully, but that is not an insurmountable problem for those who are sufficiently motivated. As is perhaps demonstrated by the numbers of complete distributions, which have been compiled (mainly from existing components) by individuals, usually in order to meet some requirement that the mainstream distributions don't.

[#11]

Quote from: Denzil

Different kernel version? Drivers are part of the kernel, so if that is updated thye might change. Doesn't explain why they would drop support for some devices, though, unless it is just to save space on supporting old and obscure hardware.

It's more accurate to say that essential and commonly needed drivers are built into the kernel. Additional drivers will almost always be loaded from files during boot or at run-time to support hardware that is not directly supported in the kernel.
Drivers included in the kernel are very dependent on the internal structure of the kernel. So support for old hardware will often be dropped simply because the author of a driver fails to update it to make it compatible with newer kernels.

[#12]

I think it is safe to say that most people are like me. With so many different versions of Linux available why spend the time trying to resolve a problem with drivers in one distro. I do really enjoy working with linux but my interest lies in configuring it as a webserver and not working with or going anywhere near the kernel. I know if I did start that it would run into days. Thankfully there are obviously lots of people who are prepared to do this and have brought us the distros we have. For this I am very grateful.

[#13]

So this thread should be labelled "A few reasons why most people can use Linux"