well as far as i understand with linux, a distribution will include all the most used drivers that are available, for any and all hardware devices (which is a lot) with the latest distro. Then you can compile the kernel yourself if you wish, to remove support for any hardware devices you don't have, if you feel the need to save a few kilobytes of space.
The effect though is that you rarely need worry about whether a device is plug and play or whatever, because it usually works just fine, due to most harware support being already compiled in by default without the user needing to even know what compiling is.
There are quite a few exceptions though from what i read, and every distro has a different idea of what drivers to include as default and what ones to leave out, but hey, that's just life...
