Seems highly likely that Microsoft have better data on which hardware is actually in use. Linux is more likely to have a driver for some obscure hardware, beca

Seems highly likely that Microsoft have better data on which hardware is actually in use. Linux is more likely to have a driver for some obscure hardware, because no one has actually been comfortable removing it in the past decade, but it's also not actually tested on actual hardware. Unless it's an Itanium CPU, in which case the code is gone. We had the same story regarding file systems last year. Technically Linux had a driver for an old Unix filesystem, but it had only been tested on filesystems made with the same driver/filesystem-code, not on actual disks with the original filesystem. The Linux advantage is that if you really need that hardware to work, you might get lucky, and if not, you're not starting from scratch.