You raise a good point about the software not shipping on CD. A really good example of this was when I bought a USB Bluetooth dongle last week, and a friend of mine bought the same one. I'm used to having my PC set up to grab whatever software it requires from online repositories and just installing new hardware, watching what gets installed, and then running the appropriate application after the fact. My friend's PC was currently running windows (though he does dual-boot) and we stopped at his place first. I plugged the dongle in, clicked over to his System Properties, and expected to see the dongle there, more or less configured and waiting for me to run software that uses it. This was definitely not the case. He took the CD out of the packaging, put it in the drive, and we got everything set up. When we got to my place, I plugged my dongle into my laptop's USB port, went into my hardware management app, and clicked "OK" when the system was ready to grab the software and install it. My friend was amazed that I didn't need the CD for my machine, and I didn't even think of using the manufacturer's disc when we were on his machine. One of the biggest things I notice about the "windows is easy, linux is hard" argument is that both OSes are equally easy/hard, you just have to realize that the two operate on very different paradigms.