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It's the year 2019. We communicate with the speed of light across the ocean and manipulate DNA, but installing drivers is still not a solved problem on Windows.

It's the year 2019. We communicate with the speed of light across the ocean and manipulate DNA, but installing drivers is still not a solved problem on Windows... ... and a modern display server is still not used by default on Linux.

JohnTHaller 7y ago
To be fair, one less desire-able 'solution' to drivers issues would be to not allow the hardware to work at all. MacOS users don't have access to Nvidia graphics cards, for example. I'll take Windows' driver work over that any day.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  MacOS includes drivers for (most) 700-series graphics cards. It's just, Apple hasn't shipped Macs with nVidia cards since 2013ish, so they don't ship Mac OS with drivers for cards they never used, either. nVidia used to ship third party Mac drivers for their newer cards, but they decided to stop maintaining them a couple years ago, possibly because Apple said they wouldn't sign them them†, depending on how you interpret vague PR statements. Still, the third party drivers work on slightly older OS's—I'm currently typing this from a macOS High Sierra machine that has a GTX 1080 Ti. † I want to note that driver signing isn't some draconian Apple thing, 64 bit versions of Windows also require signatures. You can install unsigned drivers on macOS by partially disabling SIP, but presumably nVidia didn't want to ship drivers that would require that.
  - gdxhyrd 7y ago
    Even for supported cards, Apple's drivers are broken. OpenGL support is a decade old and deprecated. No Vulkan support whatsoever. No Direct3D either. No CUDA even if you own an NVIDIA card. The only thing that works is Metal, on purpose.
  - maximilianburke 7y ago
    It’s not the driver signing that’s the problem. It’s that Apple is a gatekeeper for driver signatures and won’t release drivers unless it suits them. I know the GTX 1080 works on High Sierra, but that OS is at (or near) the end of its supported life. Microsoft manages the driver signing process but doesn’t play these games. If nVidia wants to write and maintain drivers for macOS, why get in their way?
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      I guess it just depends on what's actually happening. What nVidia has said is: > Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14. A lot of people have decided to interpret this as "Apple is refusing to sign nVidia drivers", but I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion without more explicit details. For example, nVidia has continued to release drivers compatible with High Sierra security updates (necessary because nVidia driver coded their drivers such that they'll refuse to launch on non-whitelisted build numbers). Apple has not suddenly refused to sign those drivers. My personal theory: in Mojave, all desktop compositing goes through Metal, so nVidia would have needed to a major rewrite of their drivers. Given how few Mac users install third party graphics cards, this isn't worthwhile for nVidia. nVidia wants Apple to implement some type of legacy shim in macOS that drivers can plug into, and Apple characteristically said no. That, to me, makes more sense than Apple suddenly deciding not to sign any drivers which are compatible with 10.14+.
      - unicornfinder 7y ago
        People also seem to be interpreting the line "eager to help Apple deliver great drivers" as Nvidia having new drivers ready to go, which I strongly suspect isn't the case.
      - gdxhyrd 7y ago
        Doubtful. Apple hasn't provided proper drivers for years, way before 10.14. And regardless of GPU brand. Not only that, the cost of implementing a Metal frontend is trivial for NVIDIA.
deith 7y ago
Modern != better
neltnerb 7y ago
Yeah, I was kind of expecting an announcement that they've figured out a way to make it possible to install drivers in place regardless of source without rebooting. It took about half way through to realize they just meant a UI change... kind of surprised they bothered with an announcement.
- StillBored 7y ago
  The vast majority of windows drivers can be installed and upgraded in place, since at least NT/windows 2000. That is unless they regressed something in win10. Back 20 years ago, I was doing windows driver development and even then outside of some storage filters, and maybe IIRC the graphics drivers all you needed to install/update a driver in place was the package/.inf files. I'm pretty sure that continues to work as of at least win7 where one can go into the device manager and click hardware without drivers and install/activate most things without rebooting. Or upgrade/switch drivers for a piece of hardware. Its only if windows fails to stop the device does it request a system reboot. Probably the biggest problem, are the stupid little monitoring utilities that some vendors provide that open the device and never respond to device state change requests.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    Oh, totally agree that it's much better than it used to be. And far fewer reboots. Solid kudos to them on that. Still happens though. Thought they maybe had a clever way to make it invisible to more legacy software that forces reboots, or to make it so windows update never required one, or something similar new. That would be pretty amazing to me and worth an announcement. UI change, less so.
_bxg1 7y ago
That's because those are social problems, not technical ones, even if they happen to take place on a computer
smt88 7y ago
I switched from Linux to Windows 7 or 8 about 5 years ago and haven't thought about drivers since then. For most people, drivers are likely something they never deal with.
vbezhenar 7y ago
I bought Lenovo laptop few days ago and installed fresh Windows. Then I enabled WiFi and left it for a hour. It installed all drivers automatically. I'm sure that there are cases where Windows won't install proper drivers, but from my experience Windows does awesome job at installing proper drivers. PS I also booted Ubuntu LTS Live CD and while it worked, hardware support was not very nice. Display FPS was set to 60 instead of 144 and after 5 minutes it turned display off and I couldn't turn it on. I guess, with enough tinkering those problems could be solved.

JohnTHaller 7y ago

To be fair, one less desire-able 'solution' to drivers issues would be to not allow the hardware to work at all. MacOS users don't have access to Nvidia graphics cards, for example. I'll take Windows' driver work over that any day.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
MacOS includes drivers for (most) 700-series graphics cards. It's just, Apple hasn't shipped Macs with nVidia cards since 2013ish, so they don't ship Mac OS with drivers for cards they never used, either. nVidia used to ship third party Mac drivers for their newer cards, but they decided to stop maintaining them a couple years ago, possibly because Apple said they wouldn't sign them them†, depending on how you interpret vague PR statements. Still, the third party drivers work on slightly older OS's—I'm currently typing this from a macOS High Sierra machine that has a GTX 1080 Ti. † I want to note that driver signing isn't some draconian Apple thing, 64 bit versions of Windows also require signatures. You can install unsigned drivers on macOS by partially disabling SIP, but presumably nVidia didn't want to ship drivers that would require that.
- gdxhyrd 7y ago
  Even for supported cards, Apple's drivers are broken. OpenGL support is a decade old and deprecated. No Vulkan support whatsoever. No Direct3D either. No CUDA even if you own an NVIDIA card. The only thing that works is Metal, on purpose.
- maximilianburke 7y ago
  It’s not the driver signing that’s the problem. It’s that Apple is a gatekeeper for driver signatures and won’t release drivers unless it suits them. I know the GTX 1080 works on High Sierra, but that OS is at (or near) the end of its supported life. Microsoft manages the driver signing process but doesn’t play these games. If nVidia wants to write and maintain drivers for macOS, why get in their way?
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I guess it just depends on what's actually happening. What nVidia has said is: > Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14. A lot of people have decided to interpret this as "Apple is refusing to sign nVidia drivers", but I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion without more explicit details. For example, nVidia has continued to release drivers compatible with High Sierra security updates (necessary because nVidia driver coded their drivers such that they'll refuse to launch on non-whitelisted build numbers). Apple has not suddenly refused to sign those drivers. My personal theory: in Mojave, all desktop compositing goes through Metal, so nVidia would have needed to a major rewrite of their drivers. Given how few Mac users install third party graphics cards, this isn't worthwhile for nVidia. nVidia wants Apple to implement some type of legacy shim in macOS that drivers can plug into, and Apple characteristically said no. That, to me, makes more sense than Apple suddenly deciding not to sign any drivers which are compatible with 10.14+.
    - unicornfinder 7y ago
      People also seem to be interpreting the line "eager to help Apple deliver great drivers" as Nvidia having new drivers ready to go, which I strongly suspect isn't the case.
    - gdxhyrd 7y ago
      Doubtful. Apple hasn't provided proper drivers for years, way before 10.14. And regardless of GPU brand. Not only that, the cost of implementing a Metal frontend is trivial for NVIDIA.

deith 7y ago

Modern != better

neltnerb 7y ago

Yeah, I was kind of expecting an announcement that they've figured out a way to make it possible to install drivers in place regardless of source without rebooting. It took about half way through to realize they just meant a UI change... kind of surprised they bothered with an announcement.

StillBored 7y ago
The vast majority of windows drivers can be installed and upgraded in place, since at least NT/windows 2000. That is unless they regressed something in win10. Back 20 years ago, I was doing windows driver development and even then outside of some storage filters, and maybe IIRC the graphics drivers all you needed to install/update a driver in place was the package/.inf files. I'm pretty sure that continues to work as of at least win7 where one can go into the device manager and click hardware without drivers and install/activate most things without rebooting. Or upgrade/switch drivers for a piece of hardware. Its only if windows fails to stop the device does it request a system reboot. Probably the biggest problem, are the stupid little monitoring utilities that some vendors provide that open the device and never respond to device state change requests.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  Oh, totally agree that it's much better than it used to be. And far fewer reboots. Solid kudos to them on that. Still happens though. Thought they maybe had a clever way to make it invisible to more legacy software that forces reboots, or to make it so windows update never required one, or something similar new. That would be pretty amazing to me and worth an announcement. UI change, less so.

_bxg1 7y ago

That's because those are social problems, not technical ones, even if they happen to take place on a computer

smt88 7y ago

I switched from Linux to Windows 7 or 8 about 5 years ago and haven't thought about drivers since then. For most people, drivers are likely something they never deal with.

vbezhenar 7y ago

I bought Lenovo laptop few days ago and installed fresh Windows. Then I enabled WiFi and left it for a hour. It installed all drivers automatically. I'm sure that there are cases where Windows won't install proper drivers, but from my experience Windows does awesome job at installing proper drivers. PS I also booted Ubuntu LTS Live CD and while it worked, hardware support was not very nice. Display FPS was set to 60 instead of 144 and after 5 minutes it turned display off and I couldn't turn it on. I guess, with enough tinkering those problems could be solved.