I use fluxbox but that doesn’t prevent using gnome apps; my main issue with them is that god-awful look they all assumed overnight a few years ago, without the title bar and the like (I think to match the Ubuntu tendency at the time / trying to emulate the fucked-up universal touch interface thing Microsoft tried to introduce at the time ?), from gedit to, indeed, evolution. I really loathe it. And thunderbird kept a classic look (firefox didn’t, which means regular css tweaking to achieve the same result).
Also thunderbird supports calendars and webdav/webcal sync with plugins (though perhaps evolution does as well now, I haven’t checked).
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that’s also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.
Ah yeah, drivers are another thing entirely. Especially for what I imagine is very proprietary undocumented hardware. The only thing that can help there is a reverse engineer / kernel module dev.
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