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Your roommate is a chimpanzee?
In my experience Windows 7 does not "just work" all of the time. A few of the guys I play LockOn: Modern Air Combat with tried to put on Win7 and had so many sound issues etc they reverted to dual booting XP. Each O/S can have problems on an application-by-application basis. In this case, Mac OS X is generally the best for many media types. Your friend is settling for a "good enough" solution, which is fine, but it dont think Win 7 is the best at everything, k?
Sure, it breaks sometimes. I'd be remiss if I were to say that any OS gets it right all the time. Far from it. But in general, things Just Work (TM) on Windows or OS X far more often than they do on Windows.
And wrt the Mythbuntu setup, it wasn't for lack of trying. We were reading mplayer man pages, installing special drivers, following HOWTO after HOWTO. I was helping him with it, having experience with, e.g., running X.org entirely from Git master and having used Gentoo for years where manual configuration skills are a hard requirement. Never got it to work right and each upgrade of Mythbuntu just made things work.
You can download drivers these days on Windows. AMD drivers can be downloaded from the website. And guess what? I just run the EXE, click next a few times and it works! Amazing! And even if I don't have the drivers, I can count on VESA working and not being entirely unusably slow as is the case on Linux.
But really, rare is the hardware that doesn't work out of the box on Windows, certainly not for most consumers. On Linux, they still don't even support at all many common graphics cards and probably won't for some time. Driver disk won't even help you there. You just have to wait...or buy different hardware, usually some that's at least 4-6 years old.





Member since:
2006-01-02
I'll tell that to my roommate who struggled for quite some time with MythBuntu. He eventually gave up and switched to Windows 7. Everything works and playback is not choppy. Same hardware. Also, he didn't have to spend hours configuring and tinkering to get things to work right, things like audio and screen resolution. Stuff that you think would work on a frickin' media center-oriented version of Ubuntu.