I have an older Canon scanner that will not work in Windows well because it uses
TWAIN and it is tricky to set up in Windows XP which wants to revert to its own
scanning standard and I must continually do it from scratch for some peculiar
reason. This scanner works great in Ubuntu with no set-up. However, lots of
other distros don't work with it.
I have a newer expensive HP scanner that does not work at all in Linux (not even
detected), but works great in Windows.