The Linux community best is impressive. This version of Linux supports a far wider variety of equipment, from processors to joysticks to TV tuners than it had heretofore. In particular, audio support, long a sore point for those who wished for multimedia Linux, has been improved. While still not having the reach of Wintel, Linux has taken a giant step forward in hardware compatibility. Linux 2.2 won't support this increasingly popular peripheral bus.
Plans are already afoot to add USB support to Linux in the near future.
The new Linux will, however, for those not wedded to Intel style architectures, come ready to compile and run on the 68K, Alpha, PowerPC and Sparc architectures. It's also as friendly as a pup when it comes to working with a variety of file types. The result is a slightly larger, but more modular, kernel. While it will still be possible, albeit barely, to get text-based Linux to run on as little as 4 MBs machine, 8MBs is far more reasonable. Still, Linux requires far less hardware to work as a graphical workstation or LAN file server than Apple or Microsoft's operating systems does.