Funny thing, I've had the opposite experience with Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu. Printing to my 6 year old Ricoh color laser proved a difficult task, tangling with d

Funny thing, I've had the opposite experience with Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu. Printing to my 6 year old Ricoh color laser proved a difficult task, tangling with driver hell. It seemed unnecessary given the printer is equipped with PCL and Postscript emulations, but Windows didn't care about those standards. The only way it would work is with the crappy Ricoh driver forcing the sacrifice of some basic functions. OTOH under Linux, gutenprint drivers worked even without altering the default settings. Maybe it was easier because I was more familiar with the CUPS setup, nonetheless the difference was noticeable. I'd concede that newer printers might be easier to configure for Windows vs. Linux or other OS, but it's troublesome that perfectly good equipment becomes "obsolete" when a few years old. In that respect Windows can be a disadvantage.