This is the most bizarre thing in the article. On the other hand, what is the purpose of comparing the default installed packages on the distribution image? I

This is the most bizarre thing in the article. On the other hand, what is the purpose of comparing the default installed packages on the distribution image? I thought there would be some useful performance comparisons, but there's none. Does the hardware require special driver to run Linux? So some distro would have the DMA bug and others don't? Or is it just those people are too lazy to upgrade their buggy drivers?