Maybe you could explain why you "need word"? I've worked for companies which " need word " before. I could open their files just as easily (more quickly as well) in libreoffice. If you have a special case, i'm sure we'd all love to hear about it.

Try installing an ati driver for Windows xp in Windows 8. How about your printer driver, will that work? Your old webcam? Scanner? Sound card? Floppy disk drive? Zip drive? I recently was helping fix a friends computer (no browser Internet access. It's using Windows 7 and I verified it's a software problem, not hardware). During the process, I plugged in your basic flash drive with a few portable apps so I could scan her whole drive. Windows failed to find a driver the first time and took at least ten minutes the second. I booted her machine into a live Linux environment (puppy Linux), and it immediately found the flash drive. Sure, Windows drivers are better. /s

If you're using the nvidia drivers in an enterprise setting, I really hope you're doing graphics intensive work. If not, nouveau drivers work perfectly fine and support older hardware.

The post didn't say the Linux admin would like using Windows, just that he'd have no trouble learning it.

Try opening a Linux file system with any version of Windows. OK, that didn't work. How about this one, write a document in MS Office, save it in an open format such as .odt. Still nothing? Hmm. I can read Windows file systems, write to a .doc file, even install some Windows applications on my Linux box. If you prefer Windows, good for you. On this one though, your facts are backwards.