6 ms·
"Avoid the pain of Windows 8" And say hello to the pain of not finding suitable drivers for half your devices.
by modarts 14y ago
"Avoid the pain of Windows 8"
And say hello to the pain of not finding suitable drivers for half your devices.
- nacs 14y agoThis is a cliched reply that would be appropriate a few years ago. Nowadays, I've found that I can install Ubuntu on more laptops and desktops and get better driver support from the initial install than even Windows can in many cases. With Windows, I've had to scrounge around for drivers and pray they're compatible with Windows 8 Professional 64bit Premium Plus Bonus edition on the same laptops.
- thebigshane 14y agoMy list so far: No official Google Drive[0] support (but we do have Dropbox) No official Garmin Connect[1] support All in all, that's not bad. All monitors, ebook readers, mp3 players, cameras, printers, wifi, mice/keyboards have all been perfect out of the box for years (for me). [0]: http://askubuntu.com/questions/161273/is-there-a-google-drive-client-available http://askubuntu.com/questions/161273/is-there-a-google-driv... [1]: http://askubuntu.com/questions/505/how-can-i-use-my-garmin-device-in-ubuntu http://askubuntu.com/questions/505/how-can-i-use-my-garmin-d...
- naglfar 14y agoThe only thing that really annoys me is that the Google Nexus 7 (and apparently all other Android 4 devices) use MTP now, which is still kind of a hassle to get working reliably. Apart from that I totally have to agree with you - even the proprietary graphic card drivers haven't given me any real problems for the last 2 years.
- munchor 14y agoThere is a Google Drive client (just unofficial). And that is completely unrelated to Ubuntu and GNU/Linux. That is Google's fault for not caring about GNU/Linux.
- thebigshane 14y agoI'm not sure if I agree with your finger pointing. Because it doesn't matter whose fault it is. Lack of graphics card drivers, printer drivers, etc were always the fault of the vendors, but users don't care about that. They just don't use Linux because "my printer won't work" or "it's a hassle to setup my printer". But, again, all of this isn't much of an issue anymore. (Also Google loves Linux and particularly Ubuntu. I'm not sure why they are dragging their feet on Google Drive but it's not because they don't care)
- ashleyblackmore 14y agoThat notion is pretty alien to me. I've thrown Ubuntu onto some pretty useless old machines and had better hardware support. Example: I found out a couple of years ago that two-finger scrolling was possible on an nine-year old machine. The option to enable this in Synaptics/Windows simply wasn't there.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI literally can't remember the last time I had driver issues in Ubuntu. The last time I had one in Linux at ALL was early Raspberry Pi builds that didn't include Broadcom drivers. And even that was easy to fix.
- squidsoup 14y agoUbuntu 12.10 still doesn't recognise my external Dell monitor which works without hitch in OSX. That aside, upgrading seems to have gone smoothly.
- ashleyblackmore 14y ago'OSX' being the operative term here. Windows is an entirely different kettle of fish. If your hardware is considered too outmoded or somehow slipped by the Windows driver dragnet, you're SOL. There are very few times I have installed Windows and _not_ had to go to another computer to get the network/wifi driver onto a USB (or CD!) and transfer it to the Windows machine so I can get the rest of the missing drivers. Having 'Device Manager' full of yellow question marks is _common_, even in Windows 7. http://i.imgur.com/zembU.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zembU.jpg Anyone who thinks otherwise either has kept their Driver CDs, has the original installation still on the machine, or is just plain lucky
- vacri 14y agoA friend of mine was so sick of the XP installer's failure to do network cards that he made a 'super-installer' .iso which was the basic XP installer plus 676 different network card drivers. "This CD will find your network card under XP".
- ashleyblackmore 14y agohaha, nice! What a joke. This happens even on Windows 7. Granted, I have only had it happen on Windows XP/Vista-era machines, but yeah, I guess the point is that Ubuntu pulls it off without a hassle in most cases
- reledi 14y agoThis a common myth. I'm going to assume that you don't tinker with your machines often. Whenever I do a fresh install of Windows, I go on a wild goose chase for drivers. The current Linux kernel supports more devices than any single Windows release. Linux also supports more legacy devices than Windows Vista or Windows 7 and supports numerous architectures not supported at all by Windows. In the case when there's no support for certain hardware, it's often the manufacturers who are at fault. They don't spend the resources to create the drivers or they make it difficult for the Linux community to make them.
- RegEx 14y agoSupport for devices is generally ok. Things will generally "work". However, configuring the devices can be an extreme pain. An example, which is trivial in OS X and Windows, is tablet drivers. In order to adjust sensitivity on my bamboo tablet in Ubuntu, I had to make adjustments via the command line after adding PPAs, installing packages, and fiddling around with values for over an hour. Don't get me wrong, I love the command line, but some things just shouldn't have to be done there.
- YZF 14y ago12.04 on Dell E6530. Display drivers don't work properly (you need to turn Optimus off in the BIOS). Logitech wireless mouse didn't work properly. Multimon support is lacking. 64 bit version is unworkable, 32 bit requires a lot of tweaking. I spent a whole day installing 64 bit, installing 32 bit, different drivers, trying Bumblebee (doesn't work). At some point an update came that fixed the mouse issues (this was 3 months ago). In Windows 7 everything works perfectly out of the box. Two external monitors, no problem (Ubuntu only supports one). Wireless mouse, no problem.
- rustynails77 14y agoA friend of mine had an external WD drive that I could not get to work Under Windows 7. It worked under Linux, but not windows. I finally found out that there was an incorrect drive letter allocation (stuffed if I know why). We frigged around trying to allocate a drive letter through admin settings. We finally got it to work, but it wouldn't recognise the file system. We reformatted it and it worked fine. Then there was the time the keyboard wouldn't work under Windows 7. It appeared and disappeared. It also worked under Ubuntu. The point is that your mileage will vary depending on the hardware and operating system. I find Linux easier to fault find, whereas Windows is a disaster to fault find. My Windows faults normally end up with "just re-format it and start again".
- incision 14y agoI find this troll genuinely amusing as "just works" device support is a major reason I've been running Ubuntu heavily since 2005. In fact, the last time I ran into any issue wasn't on a desktop. It was Ubuntu server on a newly launched Cisco UCS blade nearly 2+ years ago. At the time, I'm not sure what if anything could recognize a VIC out of the box (Ubuntu does as of 11.04).
- nobleach 14y agoI've been an Ubuntu user since Warty and donated way back in the day. I've been nearly exclusive with their desktop every release since. Most of my servers have run an LTS release. And I agree, most of the time it "just works". But I agree, that there are plenty of "windows only" type things that flat out won't work. On the laptop on which I type: fingerprint scanner(don't really care) Hybrid video(kinda care, but at least the crappy intel GPU works) WiFi(at least there's a proprietary driver available) On my Ubuntu desktop, my video capture dongle is barely supported. It tries to upload the proprietary firmware every 60 seconds. (I created a blacklist in my module config to stop it) NONE of these are the fault of Ubuntu or the Linux community. But I do understand the sentiment of Joe "just found out about Ubuntu from a geeky friend" Smith thinking it sucks cause he can't use his slick new AMD GPU without a bit (or a lot) of pain. To be fair, that pain exists on Windows too.
- five18pm 14y agoIts not a troll comment. I just spent 3 hours poring over how CUPS worked in 12.04 and trying to find out why my USB printer is not working. I just could not fix it and rebooted my laptop to Windows to print. And this after installing the official drivers and reading the official install guide, etc. The damned thing was that they have changed CUPS yet again in 12.04 and whatever the official docs says is not valid anymore. This sort of thing has been there around Linux for ever. I have reached a stage where I am just too bored to do the endless investigation and fixing any more. I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works"
- incision 14y ago>Its not a troll comment. Sure it is, it's a short, inciteful quip that required little effort and provided absolutely nothing in the way support yet produced a 30-odd comment tangent, a solid 20% of all commentary. Pretty much the definition of a reasonably successful troll. >I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works". Because one of your anecdotes is worth more than all of theirs.
- vidarh 14y agoFor the last few years, with the exception of a cheap, crappy handheld scanner, I've spent about ten times as much time downloading and installing drivers on my partners various Windows and OS X laptops than I have spent doing the same on Ubuntu. Drivers for our HP printer for example? 200MB+ download for OS X and Windows. Works the moment you plug in the USB cable on Ubuntu and have been for years.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoI haven't had a problem finding a driver since I installed 8.10 on my netbook and had to compile madwifi from source. The problem went away with 9.04 and I haven't had any issues since then.