For example installing the GPU driver for an older GPU. Or installing the driver for an obscure printer, touchpad or other weird hardware.
That’s not quite my definition of “common”.
Average user doesn’t mean total noob. Installing Windows and the relevant drivers is something many users in the “Gamer class” can do.
The “Gamer class” is far from the average user, the average user doesn’t even know what a GPU or a driver is and doesn’t care. As long as the OS installs all drivers by default or the OEM has preinstalled them all is good.
Getting the same hardware to run under Windows meant downloading the .exe and running it.
Until there’s no more drivers for that generation of GPU. The Windows 11 drivers for AMD only go down to the Vega 64, if you have a Fury X or a 7970 you’re out of luck. Not that Windows 11 even lets you install on a machine that old.
AMDGPU goes down all the way to GCN 1.2, which means you can even run a 7970 on a modern Linux OS. Even out of the box if your distro has the legacy flags enabled.
It would be fantastic if there was more hardware that works out of the box in Linux, but that’s up to the manufacturers. Until more people switch to Linux they don’t bother and until they bother everybody complains that XY doesn’t work on Linux.
As of right now the biggest hurdle is Nvidia without drivers included in Linux. Without a distro that takes care of installing their drivers they are essentially out of luck.