I have just bought an old Kaiser Baas TV dongle and getting it to work on Windows is very frustrating. The website does not have drivers available and there are only dodgy driver download websites that have anything for download. Whereas on Linux, I just plug it and then run this command to scan for channels.
jason@Yog-Sothoth » Documents » $ w_scan -X -c AU
This gave me a long listing of channels. Then I was able to use mplayer to play a TV channel.
jason@Yog-Sothoth » Documents » $ mplayer dvb://'PRIME7 Wagga Wagga(PRIME)' -vo gl -cache 8192
This worked first time. Why is it so hard in Windows to get hardware working when it works first-time on Linux? That is why many people prefer to use a Linux distribution, the hardware support is above par. This is what Windows 10 should be, but it is not. Windows 7 came with Media Center to watch television programs and record TV as well. But that was removed in Windows 8. No idea why, it could do so many good things.
Linux is far more versatile in terms of what the user can do with various hardware. With an Arduino, it is possible to use a mouse as a primitive camera. More information here: https://www.bidouille.org/hack/mousecam. That is quite nice indeed. That is why we need open-source software to oppose paid solutions like Apple and Microsoft. Although Apple use the Darwin UNIX kernel. But installing Darwin by itself is not easy to do. I tried that once and I could not get the installation to finish. It would have been fun to use if I had been able to get it on my machine. But Ubuntu 18 is very good with just about any hardware that is installed. Why can Windows not have hardware drivers/firmware in the kernel that enable common hardware to work out of the box on Windows? This is why a box running Ubuntu or Debian can be very useful to use old hardware on. Debian would need to have the non-free firmware package installed, but that is a small issue. it is free software, a good alternative to solutions like Windows 10 that has doubtful security and many strange services running that send user data to various companies.
That is why Wireshark was invented. But the user would need to block the offending traffic on a system like a hardware router that was separate from the Windows machine. Just using Windows Firewall will not work. But who knows what would happen if you block this stuff? Someone should test this out.