Nobody said anything about Microsoft here, so I don't understand the comparison. Just like Apple is better than Microsoft in that they don't actively prevent people from running the software of their choice on the hardware they bought, there's other companies that are better than either of them. There's hardware component vendors like AMD, Intel, and Realtek that employ people to maintain and upstream Linux kernel drivers for their hardware rather than leaving it up to the community to reverse engineer everything and develop new drivers like Apple does. Then there's PC companies like Lenovo, Dell, and System76 that will build a computer with these components and sell it to you with Linux preloaded. No dealing with Microsoft is required.