Linux

The vast majority of drivers are included with the Linux kernel now (in tree) so the difference usually comes down to kernel version (newer kernels have more drivers, of course) or kernel configuration set at compile-time (this can be anything from including or not including drivers, to turning driver features on and off, or more fundamental changes beyond drivers)

You can get kernel version info from uname -a and a lot of the time, probably most of the time (this is also down to configuration), you can get kernel configuration info from /proc/config.gz (use gzip -d to decompress) or something like /boot/config

Then you can run diff on configurations of 2 different distro kernels you're interested in to see how the 2 distribution's kernels were set up differently

This could also be caused by different setups of userspace tools or UI that interact with these drivers in different, sometimes worse ways but this is usually much less likely in my experience (most Linux distros do things like this the same way these days tbh)

Oh, also, there are a lot of drivers that require vendor-supplied firmware or binary blobs to function and most of the time distros don't bake these into the kernel (although it is possible) and different distros might have more or less of these blobs available or installed by default or they might be packaged differently. The kernel should print an error message if it can't find blobs it needs though

I guess there's kinda a lot to consider lol. Sorry if all of this is obvious

What hardware are you talking about specifically?

How to fix shit that doesn’t work:

Use lspci/lsusb and lsmod to show you what devices are attached to the computer and what kernel modules are loaded presently.

Use the modinfo command to show information about kernel modules.

Use ls /lib/modules/kernel_version/drivers to see what modules are available.

Use your distributions package manager to install more optional modules.

How to figure out if something will work:

Use lspci/lsusb, look for those components and their kernel modules, see if they’re available in the distribution you’re investigating.

To give an example: I use an hp stream 11 for some stuff. It’s a little laptop with a relatively obscure Broadcom wireless card. Rhel removes support for old and unpopular hardware pretty frequently and doesn’t support that network card. To get it working on that little pc I ended up building the module from source (available in the el9 third party repositories) and doing Broadcom-wl manually every time the kernel updates. If I didn’t want to keep my wits about me, I’d make a script to run when uhh yum? upgrades the kernel to run a reinstall of the driver.

A lot of the answers here are mentioning the kernel. The version of it and what not. Look, the distro compiles the kernel for you, they are not gonna support literally everything but they have to make a choice. That choice is stored in the "kernel config". If you have one distro working and another one not, compare the two configs. It's gonna take a lot of work to parse through, there are many config settings. But where do you start to look? Most distros have their config published in two places: /boot/config-, for any installed kernel, or /proc/config.gz (cat /proc/config.gz | gunzip to read), for your running kernel. Get the two files from the distros, compare, find what seems relevant, make the changes (I only know how to do this in gentoo), and test.

Kernel

I find Arch based distros have pretty solid hardware coverage. Lots of older hardware support baked in, plus newer kernels ( newer drivers ), and up-to-date device firmware.

The older the kernel, the less hardware is supported ( generally ). That is going to be a big reason for the disparity between distros. But device firmware makes a difference, especially for distros that do not support non-free binaries. Debian has gotten a lot better since they changed that policy for example.

The more desktop centric a distro is, the more likely they are to bundle a broad selection of hardware drivers.

Three things:

1. The kernel version they got. I have had hardware that didn't work in one distro but it did on another, but their difference really was that one had kernel 5.11 and then other one 6.5. Big difference in terms of support.

2. Might not be a matter of driver, but a matter of firmware. If a distro allows the download/usage of third party non-free firmware code or not, a lot more hardware is supported. Not all distros do that.

3. If it's ubuntu or ubuntu-based. Ubuntu has incorporated a lot of additional drivers/firmwares/support in their kernel versions than most others.

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=search

apart from license issues of propietary drivers, it can be the kernel or modules being slightly older and the driver is only in the newest kernel / modules bundle that didn't make it into all distros yet

Could be varoius reasons. Some common ones:

• distros can have different kernel parameters
• unloaded kernel modules
• different kernel parameters
• older kernel/packages
• missing packages

You can narrow down which distros work and which hardware support is missing. Also look at archwiki for that specific piece of hardware. You can find a lot of useful information even if you don't use Arch.

I don't think you're going to find an explicit list of drivers in a distro, at least that I've found. I think a better approach will be to lookup your hardware and try to find what kernel version support was added. If the distro is shipping that version or newer, you'll probably be good to go.

There's exceptions however like proprietary drivers. While those drivers are becoming exceedingly rare, some distros will only ship with FOSS software, don't expect debian to ever work out of the box with nvidia. This is usually a principles/morals decision by the maintainers. That said distros that ship closed source software usually advertise it, they might offer an Nvidia build or the distro include software like steam pre-installed.

You didn't mentioned your component specifically but if your hardware doesn't have mainline kernel support, is pretty good assumption it's proprietary and will need to be handled separately with something like dkms. Check the distros documentation for their recommended approach.

Edit: to clarify on my debian example, Nvidia cards will work with open source nouveau out of the box on debian, but you will definitely want to install proprietary driver if you're using the card for CUDA or gaming.

I feel like 99% of the time it's just "does this distro have drivers for this hardware". If yes it works, if no it doesn't.