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by Xylakant 2761 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.