I do occasionally fall for just buying shtuff without a quick google search to see if my kernel would be cool with it, but I have an even greater number of stories about good experiences with Windows shtuff driving me bonkers.

For example, the Brother ADS-1200 under WIndows beats anything SANE supported scanners can do hands down. Scan to PDF with excellent compression and top of the line OCR. The spousal unit needed a scanner and I found a good deal on an ADS-2100. Under Linux, scan results are totally comparable to the ADS-1200, so the hardware is fine. But the Windows software for this scanner is crap. JPEG and TIFF are identical to the Linux scans, but OCR and PDF compression are atrocious. I'm 100% sure that if I were to edit a table in the ADS-1200 software, it would happily apply the same excellent results to the ADS-2100. But I've had it with hacking Windows goop, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, so onto Craig's list the 2100 goes... Built in obsolescence, welcome to the Windows world.

With Linux, once the kernel accepts it, it's smooth sailign without too many vendor introduced hickups.

And even on Windows, if you need to use third party scan software like VueScan because your scanner happens to be older than your Windows. it'll work but it won't outperform SANE supported scanners.