Linux has built-in support for way more hardware than OS X and full support for generic USB devices (and then some, with "quirks tables" for many standard-but-glitchy devices) so it's hard to say it's worse than OS X in that respect.

You'll also find that there are devices that had decent drivers for Windows XP when they were released, but never had Vista or Windows 7 or later drivers made. Those devices worked well on linux a couple years after they worked on windows with reverse-engineered drivers, and then (ironically) kept working for a decade or more, whereas the windows drivers did not. This includes a variety of printers, sound cards, non-standard usb devices, and more.

It's definitely true that many hardware companies which have modeled their driver development and support around the windows model can't handle the linux model at all. But linux has other priorities than to cater to them, and has done better than windows in server and embedded use-cases as a result.