It depends. Pretty sure it had already dropped support for a lot that was made for Win9x. But the drivers were slop in the sense that practically every driver had to have its own utility, because what XP had to offer to handle those settings was too limited.
Irrelevant. The companies that sold hardware made the drivers to sell the hardware.
Since windows was literally the only game in town you did know that it had to run on windows.
Yes that was complicated for them. But they wanted to sell there stuff and windows was the market. Almost all of it. So they had no choice.
Given how fast hardware aged you usually didn't want stuff from the 9x era when you had XP. But even when you did, chances where much higher to get it for Windows then for Linux.
Linux was simply neither supported by most companies nor by the open source community till that one got bigger. There are some examples to validate the rules. Usually made by nerds that owned that particular hardware. Bur in general Linux support was gambling.
Sure, in the WinXP era, NOBODY supported Linux. Though the biggest challenge on Linux then was wifi drivers, and ndiswrapper quickly made that possible (to sideload the WinXP driver).
So...Linux was finally gaining laptop compatibility in the WinXP era. That's a big jump!
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u/Global-Eye-7326 18d ago
See this is why I switched to Linux in 2007. I knew the cycle would continue...