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Windows: Sometimes Windows Update can't automatically find an appropriate driver the first time a device is connected and I have to install one manually. Time

Windows: Sometimes Windows Update can't automatically find an appropriate driver the first time a device is connected and I have to install one manually. Time lost: fifteen minutes, tops. Linux: Last time I bought a USB wifi dongle, I bought one with a Linux penguin on the box. It turned out that the driver was a realtek fork and I had to manually apply their patches and rebuild every time my kernel updated. Could never get DKMS working quite right. Time lost: two hours. I have dual monitors, one running on an Intel integrated card, one running on NVidia. Either one can run on the open source drivers alone, but I cannot activate both at the same time. The Intel drivers output hot garbage when Nouveau is running. There's a "flicker free" mode which eliminates a similar problem, but the Intel driver appears to ignore my config in this duel head configuration. Time lost: eight hours.

simion314 6y ago
My experience: WiFi device comes with CD but I have no CD-ROM. Then I try to google this no name brand and find the official website but fail. I plug the device in Linux and figure out exactly the real chip used (many devices reuse same chips and put their own antenna and branding on top). Now I know the real chip name but the guys that make it do not offer driver downloads to regular users, so I need to Google and find some driver. Then the next problem, what website that offers driver downloads should I trust? I never heard of any of them, in the end I remember that many years ago I was downloading stuff from softpedia, decided that I already spent too much time on this and since it was my son PC I can risk it and grabbed a few potential drivers from there. After that I needed to refresh my memory how to install drivers when you don't have a wizard and read a quick tutorial and follow it. Conclusion, there are tons of hardware , as a Linux users in more then 15 years I can list only this issues(I am not using 4K or multiple screens setups): - a few years back AMD catalyst driver dropped support for my 1 year old laptop (maybe the chip was older) forcing me to decide if I use older software or the crappy at that time open source software ( this costed AMD sicne I bought NVIDIA next time) - for latest NVIDIA driver I just need to google , find and enable and official repository and now I can install from a list of drivers versions, I do not need to make an NVIDIA account to get updates. - my Cannon printer was detect fine, I had to select a similar model from a dropdown and change a setting from RGM to CMYK (I had to google this) - I had issues with microphones on cheap headphones, my solution was to buy USB headphones - they just work (including Microsoft ones) no driver installs I never had to install an audio or network driver on Linux, on Windows I had issues with same hardware where installing drivers from Windows and not from the original CD would make the audio and network conflict (both were Realteck chips and Windows would get confused). Btw I am not saying your experience is not happening, I am sure that some new hardware will be missing support and some other hardware might experience bugs, I added my experience to put things in balance.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
Windows: Still has no package manager. Setting all software up takes time. Hardware was done by the laptop manufacturer, don't know how much work that would be. Works fine for the most part. Keyboard, mouse, wacom etc require a bit of fiddling. Linux: Software setup is really easy. All hardware worked out of the box. MacOS: Reading instructions, preparing installer etc. Got it "working" in a VM but without graphics accel, which makes it not really useful. Time lost: A few hours more for windows, but quite comparable.
- boogies 6y ago
  There technically is a “Windows package manager” https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli, though it doesn't manage installed packages yet (that seems to be planned for v1.0 sometime next year https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/windows-package-manager-v1-roadmap.md https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...).
- jamesgeck0 6y ago
  Windows has like six 3rd party package managers. Chocolatey and Scoop have large repos and have been around since Windows 8. Modern Windows devices ship with the specific drivers required for the hardware and download drivers for unknown hardware automatically. Building my gaming PC from scratch, I didn't have to manually install drivers for anything. I've never even heard of a keyboard/mouse that didn't work out of the box.

simion314 6y ago

My experience: WiFi device comes with CD but I have no CD-ROM. Then I try to google this no name brand and find the official website but fail. I plug the device in Linux and figure out exactly the real chip used (many devices reuse same chips and put their own antenna and branding on top). Now I know the real chip name but the guys that make it do not offer driver downloads to regular users, so I need to Google and find some driver. Then the next problem, what website that offers driver downloads should I trust? I never heard of any of them, in the end I remember that many years ago I was downloading stuff from softpedia, decided that I already spent too much time on this and since it was my son PC I can risk it and grabbed a few potential drivers from there. After that I needed to refresh my memory how to install drivers when you don't have a wizard and read a quick tutorial and follow it. Conclusion, there are tons of hardware , as a Linux users in more then 15 years I can list only this issues(I am not using 4K or multiple screens setups): - a few years back AMD catalyst driver dropped support for my 1 year old laptop (maybe the chip was older) forcing me to decide if I use older software or the crappy at that time open source software ( this costed AMD sicne I bought NVIDIA next time) - for latest NVIDIA driver I just need to google , find and enable and official repository and now I can install from a list of drivers versions, I do not need to make an NVIDIA account to get updates. - my Cannon printer was detect fine, I had to select a similar model from a dropdown and change a setting from RGM to CMYK (I had to google this) - I had issues with microphones on cheap headphones, my solution was to buy USB headphones - they just work (including Microsoft ones) no driver installs I never had to install an audio or network driver on Linux, on Windows I had issues with same hardware where installing drivers from Windows and not from the original CD would make the audio and network conflict (both were Realteck chips and Windows would get confused). Btw I am not saying your experience is not happening, I am sure that some new hardware will be missing support and some other hardware might experience bugs, I added my experience to put things in balance.

diffeomorphism 6y ago

Windows: Still has no package manager. Setting all software up takes time. Hardware was done by the laptop manufacturer, don't know how much work that would be. Works fine for the most part. Keyboard, mouse, wacom etc require a bit of fiddling. Linux: Software setup is really easy. All hardware worked out of the box. MacOS: Reading instructions, preparing installer etc. Got it "working" in a VM but without graphics accel, which makes it not really useful. Time lost: A few hours more for windows, but quite comparable.

boogies 6y ago
There technically is a “Windows package manager” https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli, though it doesn't manage installed packages yet (that seems to be planned for v1.0 sometime next year https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/windows-package-manager-v1-roadmap.md https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...).
jamesgeck0 6y ago
Windows has like six 3rd party package managers. Chocolatey and Scoop have large repos and have been around since Windows 8. Modern Windows devices ship with the specific drivers required for the hardware and download drivers for unknown hardware automatically. Building my gaming PC from scratch, I didn't have to manually install drivers for anything. I've never even heard of a keyboard/mouse that didn't work out of the box.