And this story that windows drivers work forever is a rosy tinted view of the world. Many drivers (my ltc scanner) stopped working working from win9x to xp. I saw an USB projector driver break when a system was updated from win 7 to 8. The same device worked as a fb device out of the box on my rockpi4. And windows drivers are platfrom dependent, the same driver will nit work on 32/64 systems or arm/x86. Linux is entirely another world.

I recently installed XP drivers on a Windows 10 system. Worked flawlessly, even though officially this wasn't supported. 9x to XP/Vista is the last breaking change we've seen and that was over 15 years ago. It's quite impressive actually.

I've got an Asus CP120 USB mini projector. When you plug it on a windows machine it presents itself as a mass storage device with the windows 7 (or xp, I don't remember) driver on it. Last time I tested, it didn't worked out of the box on a windows 10 machine; it would probably work if drivers were downloaded and installed, but I didn't bother.

On my rockpi4, I simply plugged it and instantly I've got a terminal on my wall. It is an ARM machine. That's the HUGE advantage of having a driver in the kernel: it will work on every architecture the code can compile. That was just the same experience with my usb wifi dongle, with my wacom tablet, with an epson multifunctional (I had to apt-get install escpr, but it is a single command), samsung printers... Some of these drivers are in user-space and not in the kernel, but it worked flawlessly in more than a single arch. That is impressive.

But I do admit I envy the number of drivers for desktop gadgets that are compatible with windows. Of course, binary drivers are only interesting you use a single arch.