The stated goal - at least from a large portion of the linux community - is to see as many people using Linux as possible.
Yes, that seems to be the goal shouted most often, but I for one think it's the wrong one. I think the goal should be to have an operating system that work as we want it to work, not one that works in such a way that as many people as possible will want to use it, when that way very well might conflict with the way we want it to work.
Linux, IF you want it to reach that "critical mass" market share point, needs to reach a certain bar of compatibility. This doesn't mean that it needs to be compatible with everything known to mankind, but it DOES mean that you need to support, say, the major product lines of the "big three" video board market share holders (NVidia, ATi, Intel), the "big three" styles of audio card (built-in AC'97, Realtek, Creative), and so on. And these need to work without users having to go hunt down some obscure repository, post to 5 messageboard forums, and then follow instructions written like "well obviously you have to bleep fraggle this and sudo command toggle bashznz that and then it'll work, what kind of a lame n00b are you if you don't understand that."
And this is a complaint I've heard once to many from people who only want to have something to complain about. This all comes down to circumstances. The primary reason to why it's sometimes easier to get troublesome/exotic hardware to work with Windows is that you probably have the driver disc that came with the computer. Once you lose that disc, it's not nearly as easy anymore.
I just can't count the times that I've been called over to a friend to help them fix their computer and having to search the web for hours just to find Windows drivers for every piece of hardware in the computer when everything just works when popping in a Linux live CD (and if it wasn't for the Linux live CD, I wouldn't have been able to connect to the internet and find the ethernet driver to begin with).
