who

This so-called article contains absolutely no information to support the headline. It’s worthless garbage.

All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.

No, I pointed out that the problem you described is completely avoidable, which wasn’t apparent in your original comment. This is an important distinction to other readers who are considering a move to Linux, since they otherwise might be put off by your suggestion that doing so is necessarily a hardware lottery.

It was a different perspective, not a personal attack.

Your combative, snarky response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unnecessary. Goodbye.

Trying whatever hardware one already has on hand is perfectly reasonable, but it’s not a lottery.

Bear in mind that an OS image captured from a bare metal installation might fail to boot in a VM, depending on whether the original installation included the drivers needed in the VM environment. In that case, I would suggest learning about whatever recovery tools Windows offers these days, and trying to add the needed drivers.

taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.

There isn’t a hardware lottery under Linux, either, unless you buy random hardware instead of choosing known-good components or turning to one of the system vendors who do this for you.

I find it kind of weird that people who would never take mystery medication without it being prescribed to them, and would never buy a paycheck worth of food without considering its contents against their allergies and tastes, would buy a computer without checking whether it will run the software they intend to use.

Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)

it does streamline some things that Debian makes annoying (graphics drivers, for example).

Do you by any chance mean Nvidia drivers?