These days, for consumer hardware, you’ll get perfectly adequate drivers automatically via Windows Update, so the days of needing to download drivers from the manufacturer are gone on Windows, too. There are a couple of features my printer has that need the vendor’s driver instead of the Microsoft one, but they needed the vendor’s proprietary Linux driver instead of the FLOSS one from the kernel last time I looked, too. The one win I think Linux has here, though, is that it’s much more likely the FLOSS Linux driver will still work on an up to date system in a few decades than it is that there’ll be any driver compatible with Windows in that era.
As far as I know, you still need to install some sort of 3rd party application in order to scan things. Printing to a “normal” printers handles just fine on all OS’s these days, even the mobile ones. This is why I mentioned scanimage. It’s a terminal utility that comes with a lot of different distros.
The user of the OS doesn’t have to do anything. Just go into terminal and type in “scanimage” - don’t have to worry about downloading an app, don’t have to worry about setting up drivers, etc
It was just an example I thought of to show that Linux in certain areas is going to be simpler and smoother than Windows. It “just works”. The main crux is familiarity with the terminal.
These days, for consumer hardware, you’ll get perfectly adequate drivers automatically via Windows Update, so the days of needing to download drivers from the manufacturer are gone on Windows, too. There are a couple of features my printer has that need the vendor’s driver instead of the Microsoft one, but they needed the vendor’s proprietary Linux driver instead of the FLOSS one from the kernel last time I looked, too. The one win I think Linux has here, though, is that it’s much more likely the FLOSS Linux driver will still work on an up to date system in a few decades than it is that there’ll be any driver compatible with Windows in that era.
As far as I know, you still need to install some sort of 3rd party application in order to scan things. Printing to a “normal” printers handles just fine on all OS’s these days, even the mobile ones. This is why I mentioned scanimage. It’s a terminal utility that comes with a lot of different distros.
The user of the OS doesn’t have to do anything. Just go into terminal and type in “scanimage” - don’t have to worry about downloading an app, don’t have to worry about setting up drivers, etc
It was just an example I thought of to show that Linux in certain areas is going to be simpler and smoother than Windows. It “just works”. The main crux is familiarity with the terminal.