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I thought it was somewhat eye opening to see linux try to bill itself as "having more drivers." I thought that A. linux was originally intended to not contain

by bloaf 14y ago

I thought it was somewhat eye opening to see linux try to bill itself as "having more drivers." I thought that A. linux was originally intended to not contain large libraries of drivers and B. the drivers that it does have are often not as good as those on windows. I will offer the example of scanner drivers and videocard drivers. True: many linux distros come with immediate support for both. You are more likely to be able to get your monitor's native resolution on first boot with a linux system. You are more likely to be able to use a scanner out of the box on a linux system. You run into problems, however, as soon as you care about more than basic operation. If you want to use a scanner that is not supported by x-sane on linux, you have a very short list of options, and one of the items on that list is "write your own driver." If you want to use certain multiple monitor setups, you typically have to install the buggy proprietary drivers. Certainly it is possible to get stable access to more advanced video card functions, but the process of achieving this is significantly more complex than letting windows update download and install your graphics driver.

lmm 14y ago
>linux was originally intended to not contain large libraries of drivers Huh? Support for obscure hardware has always been a big selling point for linux. >the drivers that it does have are often not as good as those on windows. Quite the opposite IME. With windows you will always get some kind of driver, but it will usually be buggy. Linux doesn't always have drivers, but those it does have tend to be very reliable. >If you want to use a scanner that is not supported by x-sane on linux, you have a very short list of options Sure. But how many scanners is that? Maybe I've been lucky, but all of mine (mostly HP, who admittedly have a reputation as being especially good with linux) have "just worked". >If you want to use certain multiple monitor setups, you typically have to install the buggy proprietary drivers. Buggy? Maybe by linux standards, but I've found the nvidia graphics drivers far more reliable than any I've used on windows (it's a shame that ideology means installing them is poorly integrated). Admittedly the way modern windows can seamlessly restart its graphics drivers mitigates this a lot - but linux hasn't needed such a thing yet. With Intel graphics you can do multi-monitor just fine with the open source drivers. I don't know about AMD.
- bloaf 14y ago
  You don't have to guess about scanner support: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html I gave multi-monitor support as an example, as it has been one of the areas I've had the worst luck with in linux. I've had a version of Fedora that was completely unable to support connecting an external display to my laptop, as well as an install of Ubuntu that permanently stopped displaying anything after switching the multi-monitor mode in xrandr when the proprietary drivers were installed. I've also had many whole-linux-OS crashes as a result of fiddling with multi-monitor setups. This simply doesn't happen in Windows. I've had Windows gfx driver crashes, but the only time I've gotten a system freeze in Win 7/8 is when there were actually hardware problems (e.g. faulty gfx card, or overheating.)
  - lmm 14y ago
    >I've also had many whole-linux-OS crashes as a result of fiddling with multi-monitor setups. This simply doesn't happen in Windows. I've had Windows gfx driver crashes, but the only time I've gotten a system freeze in Win 7/8 is when there were actually hardware problems (e.g. faulty gfx card, or overheating.) Shrug, completely the opposite of my experience. I guess anecdotes can contradict each other. Though I wonder: are you using an ATI/AMD card on linux, and NVidia or Intel on windows? Thinking about it when I've had NVidia cards my windows drivers have been just as stable as my linux ones - and when I tried to use linux on a machine with an AMD card I did hit some hard lockups.
- marshray 14y ago
  Support for obscure hardware has always been a big selling point for linux. While at the same time, support for current hardware has always been a plus of Windows. Hardware support is hard.

by bloaf 14y ago

lmm 14y ago

>linux was originally intended to not contain large libraries of drivers Huh? Support for obscure hardware has always been a big selling point for linux. >the drivers that it does have are often not as good as those on windows. Quite the opposite IME. With windows you will always get some kind of driver, but it will usually be buggy. Linux doesn't always have drivers, but those it does have tend to be very reliable. >If you want to use a scanner that is not supported by x-sane on linux, you have a very short list of options Sure. But how many scanners is that? Maybe I've been lucky, but all of mine (mostly HP, who admittedly have a reputation as being especially good with linux) have "just worked". >If you want to use certain multiple monitor setups, you typically have to install the buggy proprietary drivers. Buggy? Maybe by linux standards, but I've found the nvidia graphics drivers far more reliable than any I've used on windows (it's a shame that ideology means installing them is poorly integrated). Admittedly the way modern windows can seamlessly restart its graphics drivers mitigates this a lot - but linux hasn't needed such a thing yet. With Intel graphics you can do multi-monitor just fine with the open source drivers. I don't know about AMD.

bloaf 14y ago
You don't have to guess about scanner support: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html I gave multi-monitor support as an example, as it has been one of the areas I've had the worst luck with in linux. I've had a version of Fedora that was completely unable to support connecting an external display to my laptop, as well as an install of Ubuntu that permanently stopped displaying anything after switching the multi-monitor mode in xrandr when the proprietary drivers were installed. I've also had many whole-linux-OS crashes as a result of fiddling with multi-monitor setups. This simply doesn't happen in Windows. I've had Windows gfx driver crashes, but the only time I've gotten a system freeze in Win 7/8 is when there were actually hardware problems (e.g. faulty gfx card, or overheating.)
- lmm 14y ago
  >I've also had many whole-linux-OS crashes as a result of fiddling with multi-monitor setups. This simply doesn't happen in Windows. I've had Windows gfx driver crashes, but the only time I've gotten a system freeze in Win 7/8 is when there were actually hardware problems (e.g. faulty gfx card, or overheating.) Shrug, completely the opposite of my experience. I guess anecdotes can contradict each other. Though I wonder: are you using an ATI/AMD card on linux, and NVidia or Intel on windows? Thinking about it when I've had NVidia cards my windows drivers have been just as stable as my linux ones - and when I tried to use linux on a machine with an AMD card I did hit some hard lockups.
marshray 14y ago
Support for obscure hardware has always been a big selling point for linux. While at the same time, support for current hardware has always been a plus of Windows. Hardware support is hard.