He's not talking about a disk auto-running anything, but the OS noticing that a USB device was connected, looking up its USB Device IDs, and searching for a driver. Apparently that's not working.

I know you're being sarcastic, but frankly that's the way I would characterize it and it has been so for me for the last couple of years. I don't mind reinstalling Linux from scratch every couple of months because it's at most an investment of a few hours... everything works automatically. I dread whenever I have to reinstall Windows... the driver issue is just unacceptable. I'm not even talking about issues with MinGW and git or anything that I bring about onto myself... just getting all the hardware associated with the computer (laptop usually) recognized and working fully takes forever. Heck, on that laptop the USB3 ports gave me errors on Windows from time to time too even after I installed drivers for them... the issue seemed to go away, but it just left a very poor taste in my mouth.

The manufacturer of the printer did, in my case.

EDIT: To make this clear, I manually download drivers for my laptop. HP provides a nice list of all the drivers in a single place, so there's relatively little hunting going on. Maybe the supposed automatic driver detection thing would work better? Each manual driver install asked me to restart (I said no). Would the automatic one force a restart?

Manual driver downloading issue kills a day, but then you forget about it if all went well. Windows update is a gift that keeps giving... nothing like booting Windows to do some work, except then having to wait minutes for the updates to configure themselves. Windows update is by far the worst feature of Windows (since it's so intrusive).

Specter, I'd still recommend Debian. I'd go for Debian "experimental" then. (If I got the name correctly.)
Ubuntu is based on Debian "unstable" IIRC, and that distro has the disadvantage that some bugs remain unfixed for long periods (which is one of the main disadvantages of Ubuntu).
The Debian distributions are like this:

• Stable: Has tiny bugs that shouldn't bother normal use, and has old features and drivers.

• Unstable: Occasionally has big bugs, and gets fixed occasionally.

• Experimental: Often has big bugs, and gets fixed often.

I'd prefer often fixes.

I by no means advocate universal adoption of Linux as a desktop. It works with little enough hassle that the public is appeased, and good for them. They can go download shareware, turn off automatic updates, and use IE 6 for all I care (I don't do client side very much, so its not my concern).

I like Linux because depending on how much you are willing to learn, you can conceivably change the entire system. I happen to hate KDE, so I use GNOME. I hate the GNOME bars, so I use AVN. I hate skipping when I'm recording a bunch of tracks, so I compile a "real time" Kernel.

Now, some may say that there are Explorer replacements, et al, and so that doesn't make a case for Linux. I beg to differ. Any explorer replacements or enhancements are hacks to get around the default behavior. Whereas on Linux, everything is designed with a KISS mindset. GNOME is no more "Linuxy" than KDE; Its just my shell of choice.

What makes you say that? I've hardly looked at Windows 8 myself, but some of the stuff I've read suggests that although they've tried to make things as intuitive as possible; they actually assume a slightly higher level of computer adeptness than W7 in that many things are no longer explicitly shown.

This article is a bit out-of-date now, but I like how it gives a few examples of how each new version of Windows assumes a greater level of knowledge from its users.

.. So.. anyway, what have you got in mind when you say that W8 is designed for beginners?

The idea is that most users aren't going to do those things so they've hidden them to avoid confusing them. Unfortunately, that means it takes something like 4 obscure clicks to shutdown Windows 8.

I didn't bother to read through the whole thing, but I read most of the first page. I think the author is wrong. He says that Windows 8 has more implicit interactions that need to be learned, whereas Windows 7 gave more feedback. I don't think that's the case. I think we're all just so used to the implicit meaning of double-click, drag and drop, click and drag, etc., that we know what they mean. That knowledge is mostly learned through practice and observing others. The touch interfaces are much simpler to do, even though they may end up being more work (especially on non-touch devices). Such is a GUI though.

I thought the touch screen came about because the little phones were too small to have a decent keyboard, let alone a mouse?

Correct. And now that everyone has gotten used to touch screens, Microsoft figured that people are suddenly too stupid for keyboards and mice, and also stupid enough to dish out for an OS and the required hardware to support it, and that they won't figure out how a touch screen is actually an inferior input device because it has no tactile feedback and operating the input device inevitably obscures the visuals. The sad part is that they might even be right about this one. People will buy this crap, and then Microsoft will pull the plug on the older Windowses, and in a few years, people will have forgotten about mice completely and just assume touch screens are the only way one can possibly operate a computer in a meaningful way.

I'm just waiting for the medical studies to roll in, where they show the devastating results of using touch screens for 40 hours per week straight...

Yeah, but the fun part is, there is absolutely no reason to. The last time I reinstalled was because I wanted full-disk crypto, and reinstalling was easier than manually configuring an LVM setup and then copying my system partition back into place. Other than that, I have seamlessly migrated through three debian releases on three different hardware platforms without so much as a hickup, and all those computers perform just as well as they did on day one.

Unless you're talking about Linux From Scratch (LFS); with that, I can see how a regular reinstall can be the easier solution.

I've been using Windows 8 for a week or two now, and from my point of view, the "made for touchscreen" idea is overplayed. My workflow is exactly the same as on Windows 7 pretty much. The only thing that's "touchscreeny" is the Metro kick-off page, which I see exactly once when I first start the computer. I still have my desktop just the same as before. Also, the "can't run untrusted software" is overplayed too. I've seen that maybe 2-3 times and I've installed and run dozens of third party apps, even ones without installers run without warning (the 2-3 times I saw it were in the first couple days of running the system so maybe I clicked an option somewhere, I don't remember though.)

weapon_s, what in particular are you referring to?

This wasn't linked directly apparently.