I think it must strongly depend on your use case and exact hardware, because those exact reasons in my case are an argument against windows. I have to download and install what in order to get driver support? How many tray icons can one person possibly need? It's the worst in my experience with printers and scanners; "please install this 300MB package which will constantly run in the background and annoy you at the least convenient time to replace your ink - oh, and in three months we're going to completely change the interface and replace it with something that doesn't even support feature that you're using". Or, hear me out, I could install CUPS and xsane (or another sane frontend) and be done. Driver support is indeed hit-or-miss, but when it hits there's absolutely no work at all. (Exception: if your printer isn't already supported, you can often find and download a single small file to add support; CUPS is beautiful)
I agree with you that a lot of vendor software is garbage. If the hardware you use is supported by your Linux distro of choice, I'd agree it could be a better experience than installing any driver. But at least there is always a driver. That has not been the case for desktops and laptops I have had in recent years. Always something missing in plethora of Linux distributions, and the ways to solve those issues are not straightforward even for a 10-year experience software engineer. That is not something I want to think about when buying new hardware.
Yes, especially on Mac, high DPI on Linux is still garbage to this day. It's not really good on Windows either, but at least with Windows 10, it is somewhat serviceable. On Linux, support is so abysmal, it is really comical in 2018. Moreover, it seems the dev community still hasn't "seen the light" in high DPI displays, and will often dismiss or backlog required changes for support. In 2018.
HiDPI worked / works great in UbuntuGNOME. I spend most of my time in a text editor, terminal or browser, but even things like games for my kid (Tux and Tux Kart) supported HiDPI without requiring any magic tricks.
/edit setting a different scalefactor on my external (non-HiDPI) monitor was frustrating in that it worked... sometimes
For me setting up Linux got easier than Windows a few years ago. There are other problems that stop me using the platform but drivers isn't it anymore.
That's if you are on supported hardware. If your sound/wifi/disk storage/modern GPU lacks support, you are SOL for a long time and have to resort to experimental drivers that may or may not be stable and may or may not be working as expected. Meanwhile, practically all hardware has Windows drivers.
Tired meme, Windows drivers are the only ones you have to "fiddle" with out of band, I can't even think of another OS where going to a third-party website to download an executable is how you install drivers for the machine. (Not OSX, not BSD, not Linux).
Buy any desktop in any supermarket in the world and it's going to work out of the box with the latest Ubuntu. This has been the case for 5 years now.
If you have some weird hardware that needs a kernel module that isn't enabled by default or packaged as a kms for your distro, then sure I can definitely see some awkwardness there, but for instance I haven't had so much as a wifi problem in 10 years.
Definitely a stark contrast to Windows where you have to go to the manufacturer website for each component of your machine if you're not using the bloated OS that comes pre-installed.
