3 year old hardware is still very new by Linux standards. Especially wrt. hardware classes for which a unified support framework has yet to be provided, including RGB LED's and fingerprint scanners. The sleep performance thing is an interesting example, since the whole issue was caused by hardware OEM's deprecating the old ACPI "sleep" state and deciding that OS's should manage standby states entirely on their own - this too will require a lot of really hard work to be supported properly across zillions of devices.
> 3 year old hardware is still very new by Linux standards
I agree, and hence my claim - Linux have excellent support for the hardware it supports, but in general it is not lagging behind Windows in that dimension due to restricted access to required information.
