[bildung]

>> since it ships with all of the necessary drivers.

> No it doesn't, last time I checked to even get the recommended usb wifi module to work on Arch required downloading additional packages and compiling a kernel module.

Compiling things yourself is the entire point of Arch. If you don't want to mess with things like these just use Ubuntu.

[Xylakant]

There's still no stable support for my thinkpads fingerprint sensor on a current fedora/ubuntu. Last time I checked, neither supported the built-in WWAN modem in my thinkpad, either. And I'm not even using any really exotic hardware and the T460s model isn't exactly brand new either.

Windows support works perfectly well for both pieces of hardware.

[explainplease]

Okay. What about hardware that works better on Linux? Why do you assume that this issue strictly favors Windows?

[Xylakant]

There is very little standard (consumer) hardware that works better or exclusively on Linux (1). Due to market pressure, Windows drivers are widely available, but Linux is not necessarily (fully) supported. As another example: printers. Quite a few (even SO/HO) printers don't have proper Linux drivers. I can't reliably print double-sided on our office brother printer. Getting the networked scanner to work is a lesson in debugging. On MacOS and Windows: Trivial task. Just works.

(1) Keep in mind that the whole article is about consumer/end-user OS, not about server OS. I'd still bet that windows support is at least as widespread as Linux on servers.

[explainplease]

> Due to market pressure, Windows drivers are widely available, but Linux is not necessarily (fully) supported

That sounds like something Microsoft would say back in the 90s.

> I can't reliably print double-sided on our office brother printer. Getting the networked scanner to work is a lesson in debugging. On MacOS and Windows: Trivial task. Just works.

I've seen many people over the years saying the same thing in the opposite direction: their stuff works better on Linux than on Windows. You're just assuming that Windows is always better based on your personal experience. In reality, vendors often push out poorly written Windows drivers in a hurry and move on. If you're lucky, you might be able to dig out an update from 7-pages-deep on a vendor's web site, and maybe it won't introduce a new bug that keeps you on the old one.

Neither side of that binary is useful. Instead, look at the hardware you need, see how well it's supported on the platform you use by looking at actual user reports, and don't make any assumptions.

However, one assumption you can generally make is that, if a driver is in the Linux kernel, and people are using it, it will continue working, because Linus doesn't tolerate regressions in code that's actually used.