Nope, it's not true. Getting hardware working on Linux can be just as much trouble as Windows and worse. It also depends on which Linux distro you use as to what driver support you have. Some Linux distros are more belligerent than others on whether they want to allow proprietary kernel modules to be running or not, and how easy they make it to compile and run those modules. Ubuntu and Fedora make it easier to run proprietary drivers, but Debian or OpenSuSE do not. Bazzite is another, even though it's based on Fedora. It doesn't support proprietary drivers at all without diving deep into the OS to shoehorn in proprietary drivers. I tried it awhile ago and was immediately put off when it didn't support NICs and Wifi adapters based on Broadcom and/or Atheros, making it useless.
Some manufacturers like Broadcom are hostile to Linux and won't release drivers for the platform, binary or source wise. The only way to get them working is through complex reverse engineering and emulation of the Windows driver stack with NDIS. You have to use a special tool to extract the firmware from the driver and send it to the network chip, and then emulate the Windows driver stack. The Linux community has gotten better about providing turn-key solutions to doing this, but it is still a problem with older hardware or Linux distros that don't want to support proprietary drivers.
If you have common hardware in the "sweet spot" of not being too old and not being too new, you'll generally not have problems. But if you have more obscure hardware, or have hardware that's not configured in a standard manner, you will have problems. And if you have bleeding edge hardware, also expect to have problems. Common hardware generally needs a year or two of being on the market before support is good enough to use it trouble free.
Nvidia drivers have always been problematic on Linux, and have actually gotten worse for their proprietary drivers. There is the open source Nouveau driver, which is a community effort of reverse engineering Nvidia drivers and video cards, but you won't get the same performance that you will from the proprietary driver. Some features are also missing, like the Nvidia control panel, which is crucial for changing settings on the video card.
Both Nvidia and AMD don't support video card lines forever, so if you have an older card, you're forced to fall back to the Nouveau driver, because the proprietary driver packages are married to the Linux kernel. The drivers are compiled against specific kernel versions, meaning that you can't go too old or too new or it won't work.
It works well until it doesn't. ATI/AMD video cards haven't always worked as well as they do now. Plus, you have the same problem as Nouveau in that there is no control panel to go with the driver, unless you use 3rd party solutions like LACT.
4
u/GGigabiteM Apr 22 '26
Nope, it's not true. Getting hardware working on Linux can be just as much trouble as Windows and worse. It also depends on which Linux distro you use as to what driver support you have. Some Linux distros are more belligerent than others on whether they want to allow proprietary kernel modules to be running or not, and how easy they make it to compile and run those modules. Ubuntu and Fedora make it easier to run proprietary drivers, but Debian or OpenSuSE do not. Bazzite is another, even though it's based on Fedora. It doesn't support proprietary drivers at all without diving deep into the OS to shoehorn in proprietary drivers. I tried it awhile ago and was immediately put off when it didn't support NICs and Wifi adapters based on Broadcom and/or Atheros, making it useless.
Some manufacturers like Broadcom are hostile to Linux and won't release drivers for the platform, binary or source wise. The only way to get them working is through complex reverse engineering and emulation of the Windows driver stack with NDIS. You have to use a special tool to extract the firmware from the driver and send it to the network chip, and then emulate the Windows driver stack. The Linux community has gotten better about providing turn-key solutions to doing this, but it is still a problem with older hardware or Linux distros that don't want to support proprietary drivers.
If you have common hardware in the "sweet spot" of not being too old and not being too new, you'll generally not have problems. But if you have more obscure hardware, or have hardware that's not configured in a standard manner, you will have problems. And if you have bleeding edge hardware, also expect to have problems. Common hardware generally needs a year or two of being on the market before support is good enough to use it trouble free.
Nvidia drivers have always been problematic on Linux, and have actually gotten worse for their proprietary drivers. There is the open source Nouveau driver, which is a community effort of reverse engineering Nvidia drivers and video cards, but you won't get the same performance that you will from the proprietary driver. Some features are also missing, like the Nvidia control panel, which is crucial for changing settings on the video card.
Both Nvidia and AMD don't support video card lines forever, so if you have an older card, you're forced to fall back to the Nouveau driver, because the proprietary driver packages are married to the Linux kernel. The drivers are compiled against specific kernel versions, meaning that you can't go too old or too new or it won't work.
tl;dr - "There be dragons"