I remember around the time of the article unplugging a USB key from my iMac without ejecting would crash the whole machine.

I'm sure these little niggles accumulate easily when your devs never have the equivalent of the "Steve's gonna kill/fire/humiliate me if my code ever inconveniences him" thought at the back of their minds.

And god bless him for that.

It's not a hardware thing though. Linux systems work with USB devices instantly, as soon as you plug them in, without any installation phase. That makes it a software thing Microsoft did wrong.

Linux systems work instantly because they only have to support one (usually sorely lacking) driver for any device ID, and if this is a problem, don't need to prevent a friendly user interface to fix it. They don't have to deal with the real world.

Linux distinguishes devices by their manufacturer and device ID and loads the driver that matches most specifically. There are plenty of drivers for specific mice, and the correct kernel module is loaded automatically (via udev). The generic driver (hid-generic) matches all HID devices (mice and keyboard) and provides basic functionality for all such devices.

Inserting a kernel module is fast. What else would you need?

> They don't have to deal with the real world.

Uh, I'm not sure what you mean here. Care to explain how Linux does not have to deal with the 'real world'?