[thayne]

It depends. For a lot of hardware it's actually easier to get working on linux, because the driver is just part of the kernel and you don't have to do anything special, including manually installing drivers, to get it working.

There are some cases where hardware support on Linux is suboptimal, such as Nvidia cards and many fingerprint readers, but things are a LOT better now than they used to be. Most consumer laptops and desktops will run linux just fine.