It's wild. I've been using it since 1997. Twice now, I've just popped out the hard drive and threw it on a brand new motherboard and didn't have to touch anything. I also passthrough my video card for a Windows VM and haven't had to touch any of the setup for that in years. I went from Slackware to Gentoo to Arch. Arch is amazing.
Yeah, Windows freaks the fuck out if you try to do that. you have to uninstall basically every device driver or graphics driver and then just throw some chicken bones and pray the damn thing boots enough for you to either "fix" the OS or to recover data. (Yeah, I know you can just mount it in *nix you get where I am going with it).