Hardware support on Linux is a red herring. There are some few devices that don't work all that great, like some horrible sound chipsets and softmodems, plus th

Hardware support on Linux is a red herring. There are some few devices that don't work all that great, like some horrible sound chipsets and softmodems, plus the very latest in WiFi used to have problems (I think that's less of an issue nowadays). Some years ago there was a project set up to fix those Linux hardware issues, and they effectively didn't do any work, because they couldn't find reasonable hardware that wasn't supported by Linux. I have a (crappy) scanner that has no working drivers for any Windows beyond 98 and Mac OS beyond version 9, but it works just fine under Ubuntu/Linux. I haven't seen any mainstream, reasonable hardware that doesn't work under Linux for a long time. Really, from my perspective, hardware support under Linux is significantly better than under any other operating system. Where it indeed gets spotty is the software to use the features of the hardware. E.g. Xsane rhymes a lot with insane, the various photo organiser tools are of varying quality, to say the least, and so on. Ubuntu is making progress, but there still are a lot of use cases where the GNU/Linux/Ubuntu desktop doesn't provide good alternatives.