I've often heard Windows users claim ``it just works.'' Sorry, but this has not been my experience, and I have not been known to try to use outlandish hardware. For example, I have one HP 990C Ink jet printer, and the Windows driver supplied by HP crashed numerous times per year; attempting to stop a print job invariably crashed the driver, and the only recovery was to reinstall the driver. Many times, while browsing the Internet using Internet Explorer, the modem driver would crash; this never happened after Mozilla Firefox was installed and used as the default browser on that machine, so clearly it was a problem not only in the driver itself.
I have done some work in a computer repair shop servicing Windows computers. Failures experience by customers were typically of three categories: virus/malware issues, driver issues and hardware failures. By far, the most common was driver problems. Windows based computers, in my experience, are just not stable platforms, but the culture of computing with Windows is to accept these inconveniences.
In contrast, I have numerous Linux systems running a variety of hardware; I've yet to have to reinstall a printer (for the same printer) or any other driver. Some people claim that Linux does not recognize their hardware, which may be true; however, there are Hardware Compatibility Lists for Linux that give known, good hardware. Incidentally, there are similar lists for Windows. I've installed numerous distributions of Linux on numerous computers, and I've only seen one hardware recognition issue at install-time (an old Version of Red Hat did not recognize the chipset on a new main board; the same thing would happen with installing say Windows 95 on new, 2005 era hardware).