[Taek]

I don't think you could call it better than Windows. A lot of wifi cards have issues, and my understanding is that printer support can be pretty bad too.

If you are using a Linux machine I'd still recommend that you double check for driver support on any hardware you buy. You can expect it to be okay but you should still check. You generally don't need to check for Windows, you can just assume and you will be right every time.

[vidarh]

My experience with the last few printers I've bought is that with Ubuntu they've been recognised out of the box, while with Windows we've had to download massive driver packages from the manufacturer website before anything would work properly.

Haven't had a problem with wifi for a decade.

Double-checking for driver support is probably still worthwhile, but it's rare for it to be an issue these days, but I'd say it applies for Windows as well. Pretty much everything will have drivers for Windows, but their quality can be abysmal and you have require additional downloads.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I don't think you could call it better than Windows.

It depends on the hardware. There is a lot of hardware that is still supported by Linux but has no drivers for any current Windows versions, because OEMs have no incentive to retroactively create drivers for new Windows versions for last year's hardware.

[fapjacks]

Win10 choked on my 7990 and an onboard NIC two or three months ago. Same machine with Linux Mint? Totally fine out of the box. After about 2007, I just stopped having hardware problems on Linux. I fully did not expect to start having hardware problems with plain jane hardware on later versions of Windows, though.

[jcoffland]

The only reason Linux has occasional issues with hardware support is because people install it on machines that were originally shipped with another OS. The OEM OS likely had all kinds of hardware problems but the manufacturer resolved them before shipping that particular configuration.

[ekianjo]

it is better out of the box. Go ahead and disconnect from the internet your computers, and do a simple A/B testing between Windows and a Linux distro and see how many can recognize your USB devices without installing anything. Linux wins hands down.