Linux has better hardware support than OS X

The multi-display support is also broken (the smaller display takes on same dimensions as the larger, with hidden areas of the desktop), but that's another matter.

My setup won't be my setup forever. Maybe some new hardware comes out and I want to experiment with it. Will it work with Linux? Will the person making that hardware have Linux in mind when they're building it? If my current hardware breaks, will it be easy for me to find suitable replacement quickly? As in same-day quickly?

Is memorizing the list of "professional-grade" hardware that works with Linux -- or perhaps just the list of exceptions if that's the smaller list -- worth my time as a professional?

For you, the answer to all these questions might be "yes" or even "yes, given how much I care about using Linux for other reasons." That's great.

However, the mere fact that one has to consider these questions increases the cost of adoption. It shouldn't therefore be a surprise that fewer people use the platform as a result or that people point out this frustrates them. Maybe they even use tricky phrases like "hardware support" which can mean many things to many people to describe their frustration.

If you want to think about it algorithmically, maybe try this picture. You have two points A and B on a map with varied terrain and a path-finding algorithm. You have N seconds to get from A to B, including the amount of time it takes to find a path.

You won't be able to take fastest path if it takes longer than N seconds to find that path -- by that point you'll be out of time. Instead, the naïve solution would be to take the first path P where the time searching for P plus the time to traverse P is Those "N - M" seconds are really important in consumer psychology. If you've found multiple options and weighed them you'll feel much more comfortable in your decision. That comfort translates into confidence in the underlying platform.

On Linux the "time searching for P" is much larger than OS X, but the original article is pretending as if it's only the existence of a fast-enough path that matters. It's not, especially if the time to find the right path dwarfs the amount of time you have to spend on the problem or it results in you being able to weigh as many options as you would on another platform.

For me, personally, as someone who values his own attention very, very highly, my threshold for "time spent searching for P" is incredibly low.

Actually I am. Despite the fact you can get hardware (motherboards, RAM, drives, etc.) from many different manufacturers the "core" hardware pretty much follows a set of strict standards. Ever since Apple moved to Intel CPU based hardware they also made OS X compatible with those same standards (AHCI, ACPI, etc.). Sure, you might have the odd issue with certain configurations but in general modern Intel based desktop PCs are fairly straightforward to run OS X on.

The same applies for the Linux Kernel, except it supports far more standards and architectures then OS X.

But anyway I suppose my point is that the OS will pretty much run in most cases. However, your non-standard additional hardware (wireless adapters, your funky magic PCIe card, etc.) that requires drivers is not really because Linux, Windows or OS X does not support that hardware but rather the manufacturer of said devices choice not to support that OS. Don't complain that Linux or whatever does not support your hardware but rather complain that the manufacturer chose not to support Linux or use some kind of common standard.

Sure, common hardware or hardware that follows a standard might have a driver written by Microsoft or the linux kernel devs but most of the time the driver is written by those who created the hardware. For example it would be silly to blame Microsoft saying Windows does not support a Nvidia graphics card if Nvidia never released Windows drivers for that card. Likewise it would be silly to blame Apple if I bought some TV tuner, or similar PCI(e) card, and found it did not work in my Mac Pro.