Just now, I plugged a USB mouse into my Debian Linux box and immediately started using it.
Then I plugged in a USB Digital TV device, started a media player (which prompted for DVB region details) and having scanned for channels, began to watch TV.
No manual intervention required – no driver-loading, no configuration, no extra software installed, no nonsense. This may seem fairly trivial, but such a thing was inconceivable when I started running Linux nearly 12 years ago and looking fairly far away even 5 years ago. Without wanting to Windows-bash, even Windows users don’t have it this good – they’d be guaranteed prompts for drivers, then lots of fun messing about with usually-buggy vendor-provided software just to get the mouse to work.
I’m not saying everyone’s experience is as good as this and we’ve surely got more work to do, but we’ve come a hell of a long way in a relatively short time. I think we spend too much time focusing on the negatives in the Free Software community (that’s what encourages progress, I guess) and it’s nice to consider the positives every now and then.
