Does it, though? I use four monitors with Linux Mint at work while my laptop is docked. The 'Optimus' dual-GPU thing works out of the box. But I have a Windows 10 gaming rig at home for Star Citizen, and when I installed Windows, it didn't recognize the onboard NIC or the AMD 9790 GPU with default drivers. And as it just so happens, late last night, this same Windows 10 box mysteriously lost network functionality, and I had to reinstall network protocol drivers (!). I hear "hardware support" a lot, but I haven't had problems with hardware support on Linux for a few years at least, and every time I try to use Windows, I have hardware problems. The Windows users on our dev team seem to have problems regularly. You're right that it used to be a thing. But I just don't buy it anymore.
Or because they are not new. I had a bad experience after i bought, in January 2016, Intel NUC with Skylake processor and Iris 530 graphics card.
I had few months of struggle, like:
- problem with installation (installer won't boot without some cryptic kernel parameters passed),
- lack of graphics driver
- random crashes (like Google Maps causing the whole system to hang, requiring hard reset)
- processor not running at full speed
- system seeing only one logical core instead of 4 (2 cores x HT)
- "shutdown" system button causing reboot instead of power off
Most of those were fixed only after Ubuntu 16.04 came out, at the end of April. Some issues however, persist.
So, my impression is that Linux is good choice only if your hardware is quite old (like, say, two years, or at least one processor / graphic card generation behind)
For people like me, who want latest and greatest hardware Linux is not an option.
