This misconception often comes from folks who experimented with Linux several years ago and found its driver support hit-and-miss. Sure, it's rare to find a Linux driver sitting alongside the Windows drivers on the software CD sold with the device.
Chances are you'll need to visit the vendor's Web site. But as Linux has grown in popularity and usefulness as a general-purpose OS, driver support has also increased. Hot-plug USB, SCSI and RAID adapters, video cards and other peripherals and hardware are now supported, not only by open-source developers, but often by the hardware vendors.
Moreover, if you deploy a distribution from a vendor that has partnerships with a Tier 1 hardware maker, such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard or IBM, the issue of hardware drivers becomes nonexistent. Try deploying Slackware and you may run into problems; but even in the more generalized distributions, the question of driver availability for most hardware has become moot.
More troubling than driver support was Linux's inability to correctly probe hardware and determine which driver to use in the first place. This plug-and-play functionality, which Windows has provided for many years, took a bit longer to mature on the Linux platform. Although it's plug-and-play capabilities are by no means perfected, we've reached the point where Linux will identify and install the correct drivers for all Tier 1 hardware vendors--and, quite often, for more obscure ones.
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