In my experience is that linux could not detect all my hardware, for example my video card. This was quite funny in a way, to see Linux (mandrake 9.3) saying "Cannot detect your video card" in a 32 bits 1024x768 modus...
anyway, it was half a year back then. I am still interested in Linux. I tried knoppix for fun and that worked okay. I should probably backup a lot of stuff before i will even think about going to Linux. As i have another experience with it that was like 100 times reinstalling it because i messed the Linux settings up with a click on a button (yes, i was root, and thats probably evil...
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