Heck, I can be technically-savvy and I prefer the "just works" experience of Windows. It rarely gets in the way. All major software and games work on Windows. I don't even think about hardware compatibility. It just disappears, which is nice.
I use both systems so I have good comparison, and it is nowhere nearly as clear cut as "On Windows it just works" vs "On Linux you have to invoke unholy incantations to make it work". In some cases it is surprisingly the other way around, where Linux has some standard driver that just works and on Windows you have to install some damned bloatware just to get a fraction of the usability.
My best example case is a Asus C120 mini projector whose linux driver development I personally helped. When plugged, it shows itself as a mass storage device with a .exe file with the driver for windows 7. The driver doesn't work on recent windows versions, I don't know if you can download a new version. On linux, just plug it and it turns into a monitor. Nothing to do, no command to type. And the best part: I discovered it when I accidently plugged it on an ARM machine. It is very unlikely you could have such a good experience even with supported hardware on windows.
Unknown hardware is a mixed bag, but for printers i love the feeling that they will never stop working due to incompatible drivers. Linux gave my old lexmark printer a new life when the windows driver didn't work under windows 7. I used that printer today. It is over 20 years old, but hasn't worked in any windows version released after 2009.
Edit: and this shit happens to people all the time. I have set up rpi printer servers for 4 people. Proprietary drivers stink.
Most of the times nowadays you don't really need a driver, if your printer has wifi/ethernet capability. Almost all printers with network capability work with generic drivers over TCP/IP, and windows is pretty good with identifying these.
Now if you use USB, or god forbid LPT from the previous millennium - then yes, you need drivers that work with your combination of Windows version, x86/x64 version, etc, etc
I will never buy a network printer if USB printers are available. They suffer the usual IOT problem. In a couple of years security updates will stop showing up, and the bloody things usually try very hard to connect to the internet. Then I'd much rather roll my own with a raspberry pi running an LTS OS.
1. Assign static IP to a printer by its MAC address, instead of dynamic IP in DHCP settings.
2. only allow LAN traffic and disable all WAN traffic for that static IP
3. Disable Bluetooth in a printer settings (you can do it by visiting http://192.168.1.{printer's IP addr}
I have a printer that does wifi, but it is stuck forever at 802.11g, meaning it will degrade my wifi network and add something like a 10ms (best case) latency.
I am just old-fashioned. I understand the comfort of connecting the printer to wifi and being up and running. I will probably never do it if I have the option, since I hate having to replace a printer I like. The only downside of my lexmark is that it is slow compared to modern black and white lasers. But then again it is more than half as old as I am.
Here's another thing you can't do with Linux's driver model: install a new video driver without rebooting.
Only partially true. Linux supports almost all devices, but every now and then some companies refuse to release drivers, so the community resorts to reverse engineering of Windows drivers, and here's where the magic happens: the official Windows drivers are closed, while Linux ones are open, so the day that manufacturer decides to stop supporting Windows version X, or product X because they want to sell product Y, then it doesn't work anymore under Windows, but it will continue under Linux. As for now, there's a fairly big number of peripherals that aren't supported by Windows anymore but whose drivers are still actively developed and improved under Linux. Some hardware, given enough time, is being supported better under Linux than Windows; having Open Source device drivers can make a huge difference.
Regarding old devices, in many cases it just makes more sense to replace it with a newer device, than to spend time figuring out how to make old device work, unless this is a hobby to you (totally valid, but this only applies to a few people.)
Because it happened to me on windows, but never did anything like that happen on linux, where if it works once, it will continue to work.
Also, compared to things like NixOS’s boot into previous working config, windows is lightyears away.
But they are still much better than run this graphical installer that may or may not do what it claims, while littering dynamic libs all around the place.
Perhaps the fundamental difference is that Windows is more compatible because it enables more things by default (that are difficult to turn off), whereas Linux is more efficient because it has less bloat by default (but is difficult to enable what you need).
On both, there have been updates that spin for hours and fail. This has happened on multiple machines in multiple environments and MS "support" is a massive convoluted time suck. Maybe I'd get real support if I or the non-profits I support were Enterprise users.
I've had update issues on Linux as well to the point where I simply reinstall on a major update. That's easy to do on Linux because it is free, but a pain on Windows because it is not.
Every Windows box I support is eventually going to get replaced with a Mac because time is valuable.
This is somewhat dated, by I've shopped for hardware for Windows by chipset because some worked great out of the box, while some was finicky.
1 the hardware had a mini CD but that PC had now orking CD-Drive
2 Google for the name on the box, I found nothing . Many companies buy a chip, put their packaging on top and they sell a new product
3 Test it on Linux, it works great
4 run a Linux command to find the real chip used
5 Google for a driver for that chip
6 the official website of the chipmaker only deals with companies not random individual
7 there are many other websites where I can download a driver that might be compatible, but fuck me, can I trust sites like "driver.com", "software.com" , "xyz.com" this are random names I created , in the end I decided that I used 10 years ago softpedia.com and back then they had no malware so I ricked it
8 after I get the driver files I Google a tutorial on how to install .sys files (or maybe the extension was different, sorry)
So not all hardware just works on Windows and some hardware just works on Linux.
printers come with ton of bullshit stuff, in Linux was plug and play but I had to change a setting, but I don have the GUI for ink levels and the software that will diagnose the errors with a clear message instead of a LED. This is the fault of printer makers not Linux though...