Yep, definitely. Potential lag time on newly-released hardware can be a major issue if the device vendor doesn't upstream the driver early enough, and/or if the

Yep, definitely. Potential lag time on newly-released hardware can be a major issue if the device vendor doesn't upstream the driver early enough, and/or if the system vendor doesn't provide kernel updates in a timely manner. The optionally more direct channel from device vendor to HW customer can be a big advantage then, or the (maybe?) faster turnaround times of the Windows Update channel (Windows Update seems to do a really good job of addressing the annoying driver hunting and manual updating Windows was plagued with in the past these days). I've been hit by this as well, when I bought an nVidia card in its launch month years ago and had to fiddle before the drivers became widely available. That said, nVidia is by far the most prominent example for swimming against the tide of the general rhythm of the Linux world and the other GPU vendors do a better job with open sourcing and early upstreaming.