> I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. > 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has

> I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. > 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. One of the things Fathi (OP author) writes is > [. . .] ecosystem partners hated [Vista] because they felt they didn’t have enough time to update and certify their drivers and applications as Vista was rushed out the door to compete with a resurgent Apple. This goes some way to mitigating the characterization of device manufacturers as terrible at writing drivers. When considered in the context of "a resurgent Apple", it also provides a counterpoint in the specific example of nVidia as a niche hardware manufacturer. 2006 was the year Vista was released, at that time, Apple was shipping the quad-core Xeon Mac Pro with macOS Leopard (later Snow Leopard) which shipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card. [0] I used this particular computer all the way through Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and if memory serves, I had a handful of kernel panics over the course of 6 years. From all I could tell, nVidia's video card device drivers on Mac OS never interfered with daily operation (up 24/7 as it was also an authoritative DNS server for my personal domains). So, device manufacturers may be bad at writing drivers but those drivers also depend on stable and reliable APIs of the target OS, and such details have to be communicated between the two teams. Device drivers are an interface between host operating systems and hardware embedded systems. As such, the reliability of any device driver will depend on the sharing of information between the OS and device driver teams just as much, if not more, on the competence of the device driver engineers. [0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-2.66-specs.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-qua... EDIT: remove extraneous words, a couple proper nouns where appropriate, punctuation.