It's really a cyclical problem - as linux (as a desktop OS) has a very small user base you are unlikely to see the same level of support from hardware vendors as you do for Windows or even MacOS. That's not going to change anytime soon, unfortunately.

Personally I've been running Solaris and/or linux since the early 90s, and I've never really missed the features that are available under Windows.

These days I run RH 7.3 and Fedora Core on both my main desktop and my laptop, and I have an old-ish Sparc machine runnning Solaris 7. On the linux systems I have a VmWare virtual machine that I can boot into Windows if I really need to, which I tend to be very rarely to run Sybase's PowerDesigner database design tool.

Michael