How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it
Ah, no. Having been a windows support/user for nearly 20 years, I am all too familiar with the 'find-the-drivers' dance, in particular, find-the-network-drivers, from which you can manually search the internet and find the rest. Then you get the fun of having a series of different things keeping themselves updated. A friend of mine even when so far as to make a 'golden XP installer', which was a standard XP install disk slipstreamed with 686 different network card drivers.
And boy it's fun trying to find the right Windows drivers. Easy for us experienced folk, because we know what scam sites look like. But to naives, it can be hard to tell the difference between what might work and scam sites, let alone actually trying to find the name of the chipset you're hunting for.
So if the argument is 'ease of installing', Windows most definitely does not get a free pass.
Windows, Linux, and OSX are about equal in terms of ease of driver install. That is, it either has the driver or uses a fall-back driver while it goes online and grabs a new one. Only difference is, most Windows drivers work this way because companies make drivers for Windows. There are a few too many Linux exceptions because companies don't make drivers for Linux.
If you're bringing 20 years of experience into the driver discussion, you're not giving enough weight to Windows 7, where drivers are rarely a problem. For the naive, there's generally a restore DVD/partition with all the drivers included. If you can't hunt for drivers, chances are you didn't built your PC yourself.
The argument of 'but drivers are hard on linux' is a throwback to the days when drivers were also hard on windows, it's just that we were used to the Windows way of doing things so it was familiar. I'm just saying that Windows doesn't get the free pass that the OP was implying.
Ah, no. Having been a windows support/user for nearly 20 years, I am all too familiar with the 'find-the-drivers' dance, in particular, find-the-network-drivers, from which you can manually search the internet and find the rest. Then you get the fun of having a series of different things keeping themselves updated. A friend of mine even when so far as to make a 'golden XP installer', which was a standard XP install disk slipstreamed with 686 different network card drivers.
And boy it's fun trying to find the right Windows drivers. Easy for us experienced folk, because we know what scam sites look like. But to naives, it can be hard to tell the difference between what might work and scam sites, let alone actually trying to find the name of the chipset you're hunting for.
So if the argument is 'ease of installing', Windows most definitely does not get a free pass.