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I've installed Ubuntu 14.04 on a desktop PC and want to add a pci-express color card to the system. What will Ubuntu's reaction be to the new hardware added, will it detect and probe the device and install the necessary driver(s)? Or should I rather reinstall Ubuntu with the new hardware attached? Thank you.

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Colour card? My answer is fairly generic but I'll assume graphics card.

Generally speaking, Ubuntu has drivers for most hardware built in. Even graphics cards that offer proprietary drivers have free counterparts that will be used if you haven't already installed the proprietary driver.

This means that in most cases, you can just throw the new hardware at Ubuntu and it'll cope. If there are alternative options, the Ubuntu Drivers dialogue should offer you them when you boot up.

There are, of course, exceptions to this but there's no set rule for how you work around it. Most un-drivered hardware won't stop you booting and even then, (in the case of a RAID controller switch) you can still boot to a Live CD/USB environment to install the driver.

You certainly shouldn't need to reinstall.

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