I've been using OS X going back to the betas. I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards.
I have seen problems with third party hardware that required its own driver (poorly written generally) or that was half assed crap that was designed to work with windows but marketed as supporting standards like "USB".
Meanwhile, Linux has trouble dealing with the computer itself, let alone getting hardware attached to it. Constant pain in the ass.
Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem.
I've gotten used to being able to do that... and haven't had much trouble getting things to work with OS X in years.
Course, I also stopped buying things that require custom drivers-- that's a clear sign you're not going to have a good time.
To claim that Linux is better in this regard is, quite frankly, asinine.
In my experience, Linux works great with standards-compliant hardware. Linux is typically the first platform with support for a new standard. The problem is there is so much hardware that is not standards-compliant.
Your comment looks about as asinine to me as the as the parent comment does to you.
Being the first platform supporting it in the kernel - and then you have to wait for another few months (or years in case of Debian) until you finally have the driver in your distribution. The alternative is compiling kernel-modules yourself - which then get broken again by the distro whenever it updates the kernel without warning. And to even compile you have to follow hints on several websites until you figure out the way to compile a module just for that kernel-version you are having (this all is from experience trying to get a Wacom tablet running - I gave up on it when it broke again after a distro update and the compiling mechanism then also no longer worked for some reason. Now waiting for Debian Wheezy to save me).
"Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem."
That really has nothing to do with the OS you're running. The OS isn't driving the DisplayPort<->HDMI protocol conversion in any way (your 'no-name' brand adapter is probably relying on DP++ and just passing through the HDMI signal anyway).
This is like saying your VGA cable is compatible with Macs with a VGA port. Of course it is.
> I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards.
The problem is that hardware often doesn't really conform to standards, even those it claims to.
One of the reasons device support in Linux (and other OSes which target a wide range of platforms) is difficult, is that it's necessary in practice to cope with and have workarounds for buggy and out-of-spec hardware and firmware. Just "coding to the standard" isn't good enough.
Such buggy hardware/firmware is rarely documented as such, and finding these problems and the appropriate way to handle them is painful and difficult work. In some cases the only practical way to figure out what actually works is to reverse-engineer what Windows does (the hardware manufacturers generally make sure that Windows works with their hardware, but rarely make such information public).
Apple's main goal is their own hardware, over which they obviously have a lot of control and information, so they really don't need to worry so much about this.
If the hardware conforms to standards, Linux is the most likely to be able to support it of all three - and that's even without having to install a driver.
I have seen problems with third party hardware that required its own driver (poorly written generally) or that was half assed crap that was designed to work with windows but marketed as supporting standards like "USB".
Meanwhile, Linux has trouble dealing with the computer itself, let alone getting hardware attached to it. Constant pain in the ass.
Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem.
I've gotten used to being able to do that... and haven't had much trouble getting things to work with OS X in years.
Course, I also stopped buying things that require custom drivers-- that's a clear sign you're not going to have a good time.
To claim that Linux is better in this regard is, quite frankly, asinine.