'OSX' being the operative term here. Windows is an entirely different kettle of fish. If your hardware is considered too outmoded or somehow slipped by the Windows driver dragnet, you're SOL. There are very few times I have installed Windows and _not_ had to go to another computer to get the network/wifi driver onto a USB (or CD!) and transfer it to the Windows machine so I can get the rest of the missing drivers.

Having 'Device Manager' full of yellow question marks is _common_, even in Windows 7. http://i.imgur.com/zembU.jpg Anyone who thinks otherwise either has kept their Driver CDs, has the original installation still on the machine, or is just plain lucky

A friend of mine was so sick of the XP installer's failure to do network cards that he made a 'super-installer' .iso which was the basic XP installer plus 676 different network card drivers. "This CD will find your network card under XP".

haha, nice! What a joke. This happens even on Windows 7. Granted, I have only had it happen on Windows XP/Vista-era machines, but yeah, I guess the point is that Ubuntu pulls it off without a hassle in most cases

It's not recognising a monitor? That sounds more like Dell doing something very wrong, rather than Linux.

This diagnosis is exactly correct and completely useless to the user, and is the hallmark of the Linux hardware experience.

That sounds like a corrupted EDID on your monitor. dmesg probably spits out some useful errors. OS X is more forgiving of bad EDID checksums, I believe.