It's not fair. It's very very unfair because even in the PC world, hardware vendors write their own drivers for Windows, or release documentation only under NDA, while Linux is often dependent on reverse engineering by random contributors. And of course the latter can't begin until the hardware is actually available, delaying support.

Unfortunately, that still leaves hardware broken on a large fraction of systems, with only a handful of vendors explicitly designing systems for Linux. It's better than it used to be, but not great.