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Maybe it's not a problem for you if you upgrade your hardware frequently (and don't care that it stops working on newer versions of Windows because the vendor c

Maybe it's not a problem for you if you upgrade your hardware frequently (and don't care that it stops working on newer versions of Windows because the vendor couldn't give a shit about keeping the driver up to date), and buy exclusively high quality (and high price) parts. I had enough fun with Realtek / GPU drivers (from all three major vendors) on Windows to hate the very concept of a proprietary driver to the end of my life. The very same hardware somehow works perfectly fine on Linux. No kernel panics (not a single one in 12+ years of running it on Realtek crap), no intermittent connectivity problems, no weird GPU bugs, nothing of the sort.

pjmlp 6y ago
My netbook still has working drivers for Windows 10 with DX11 and GL 4.1 support, whereas the super cool open source AMD driver doesn't offer anything better than GL 3.3 with hardware video decoding that kind of works on full moons.
captainmuon 6y ago
I forget that you have to hedge every comment on HN :-P Of course there are not zero problems on Windows. I had a bunch of trouble when Windows 10 came out with a laptop I bought just before, I never got the touchpad working as expected. With Linux the touchpad works fine, but then yellow looks like mustard on the screen... What I mean is: I can go to the store and buy a random thing, and I can just assume there will be a driver at all and my PC will find it. I work for a company which manufactures industrial PCs with touch interfaces, and one thing we noticed with our X86 line is that we can just stop caring about drivers. Although everything down to the touch panel and the mainboard is custom, you can just throw a windows OR a Linux (Ubuntu) iso at it and it will work 99%. This is not about Windows vs. Linux, but about PnP vs. no PnP.
philliphaydon 6y ago
Yet if you want to keep up with hardware then running linux is a real pain. Want to use vanilla Debian on a 5900x and 6800xt. HAHA. Issues galore. (Still not reason enough for me to go back to Windows tho)
- broodbucket 6y ago
  Well yeah, trying to use modern hardware on ancient software is going to suck. It's like trying to run a RTX3090 on Windows XP. Debian stable is not a sensible choice for new shiny things, especially GPUs, and that's not really a "Linux" problem, it's a Debian problem.

pjmlp 6y ago

My netbook still has working drivers for Windows 10 with DX11 and GL 4.1 support, whereas the super cool open source AMD driver doesn't offer anything better than GL 3.3 with hardware video decoding that kind of works on full moons.

captainmuon 6y ago

I forget that you have to hedge every comment on HN :-P Of course there are not zero problems on Windows. I had a bunch of trouble when Windows 10 came out with a laptop I bought just before, I never got the touchpad working as expected. With Linux the touchpad works fine, but then yellow looks like mustard on the screen... What I mean is: I can go to the store and buy a random thing, and I can just assume there will be a driver at all and my PC will find it. I work for a company which manufactures industrial PCs with touch interfaces, and one thing we noticed with our X86 line is that we can just stop caring about drivers. Although everything down to the touch panel and the mainboard is custom, you can just throw a windows OR a Linux (Ubuntu) iso at it and it will work 99%. This is not about Windows vs. Linux, but about PnP vs. no PnP.

philliphaydon 6y ago

Yet if you want to keep up with hardware then running linux is a real pain. Want to use vanilla Debian on a 5900x and 6800xt. HAHA. Issues galore. (Still not reason enough for me to go back to Windows tho)

broodbucket 6y ago
Well yeah, trying to use modern hardware on ancient software is going to suck. It's like trying to run a RTX3090 on Windows XP. Debian stable is not a sensible choice for new shiny things, especially GPUs, and that's not really a "Linux" problem, it's a Debian problem.