Getting some hardware working on Windows 8.1 is a very hard task when you have lost the box and the CD. Whereas an installation of Ubuntu will pick it up straight away and it works perfectly. That is a fact these days. That is why Linux is preferable over Windows. Hardware support is very easy as long as you have the right firmware and driver modules to get the device working. I just wanted to get the Digital TV device working on Ubuntu. All I needed to do was plug it in and scan for channels like this: w_scan -X -c AU. Then paste the resulting channels listing into a channels.conf file in the ~.mplayer directory and then I am ready to watch digital TV on Linux with this command: mplayer dvb://'7TWO Wagga Wagga(PRIME)' -cache 8192. This allows a user to watch digital TV with mplayer. This works very well on Linux. Easier than trying to get MPC-HC to play DVB streams. Although that is a very good movie player for Windows. Kaffeine for the KDE desktop should also work on Ubuntu. I used to use me-tv to watch DVB television, but that program is not available for Ubuntu 17.04 for some reason.
The Kaffeine application does find channels on my Linux system. w_scan will only find a handful of channels, but Kaffeine found them all and it works so well. In the old days I had a lot of problems getting this to work at all. Now it is very good indeed. That is why a good Ubuntu desktop is so comfy. The software just works. Windows 10 added more features like a Linux shell that is the best way on Windows to manage a Linux server remotely and is a great SSH client. But basic things such as automatic setup of hardware does not always work. And the fact that Windows 8.1 and 10 do not have Windows Media Center, this means that third party DVB software must be installed to watch television. Ubuntu has free software that can do this much more easily than Windows. The new MATE desktop is very comfortable to use. Exactly the same as the old Gnome 2 desktop environment. Windows needs better hardware management and automatic installation of driver modules that would allow strange hardware to work easily on Windows. Better than the current system.