>that was kinda the point of them doing it

Well, I think the point was more a rebrand to distance themselves from the damaged IE brand. Which was explicitly stated as the point in that leaked memo I can no longer find.

There's definitely some old windows code still kicking around in there. I just manually installed my printer driver, when I clicked Have Disk it /still/ Fucking defaults to A:/

:'D

Them were the days when installing a driver it would hang for a while trying to access the floppy drive when there was no disk in it.

And the noise! That beautiful grinding noise!

:D

<vaguely remembers 'drivers'>

Whilst *nix does generally have good support for a lot of hardware, the times it doesn't can be a total nightmare.

Having to compile drivers and modules, then forget when you upgrade the kernel that it breaks everything and you have to do it all again :C

Man, you need to try harder at trolling. Linux still has drivers, i.e. a program that provides a software interface to your hardware. Whether you have them as pre-compiled binaries that you install or source code you compile into the kernel or into a module, you still have them :/

DKMS does a lot of that automagically.

Yeah, when stuff's not supported it's fucking horrible. Though I've not encountered that for a *long* time. I think pretty much everything remotely mainstream is covered by the kernel these days (with the exception of trackpads, which are like the new wifi cards).

I replied to this but it got lost when I submitted. Said something like "you do not have permission to view this page".

I'll try again...

Ok, don't know why you think I'm trolling.

I didn't say drivers don't exist in Linux. What I said was "I barely remember them" (or words to that effect). Facetiously, of course, because yes I do remember them.

But one doesn't have to deal with them in Linux. My hardware is detected and the appropriate modules are loaded. I do no have to search for them, download them, install them (manually, I mean - to be clear, they are in fact installed, yes.), worry about whether they're up to date. It's all entirely automatic, I never have to think about drivers, everything just works (as Ant says, so long as your stuff is supported. Which most is and mine all has been for several years).

This is the second time you've called be a troll in this thread (which I honestly don't think I am).

I don't think saying I barely remember drivers can reasonably interpreted as making the ridiculous claim that they don't exist in Linux. Which makes me think you wilfully misinterpreted me in order to have a go. To poke holes in a ridiculous claim that no one would ever make. Which is... odd.

You might not have said drivers don't exist in Linux, but that's how I read your post. Maybe I did wilfully misinterpret what you wrote, but maybe you also wilfully wanted me to misinterpret it?

One as in the royal one, right? We must be both lucky because our hardware works with Linux, but I can fondly remember countless times when it wasn't and yet it worked fine otherwise, and when hardware doesn't work in Linux it's often way more of a ball ache than Windows - doubly so when manufacturers refuse to support Linux by not even providing source code. Things have changed greatly, but this is also true of Windows, which leads me to...

Does anyone (except those that are stuck on Windows XP) really have to worry about making sure their drivers are up to date any more? My current machine, all of them have either been built-in or downloaded and updated automatically by Windows - both 8 and 10. That might be different for Windows 7, but if you choose not to upgrade to have this new functionality, you can't really bitch about it not being available, right?

Edit: Regards the access denied thing, that shouldn't happen so much now.

My recent one had been DVB-S2 cards. But mainly because they weren't supported in mainline, the manufacturers drivers were turd and some folks had developed better open source drivers that I was using. Then one of the cards seemed to die so I fucked it off and bought a SAT>IP box (which I'm now running a custom firmware on :$ )

Oh, and the fingerprint reader on my laptop. A year or two ago I couldn't get it to work at all. My current move to Mint relied on me getting that to work. I managed it, but I'm not totally sure what was the correct path. There was a lot of compiling and installing, a lot of which was probably not necessary, but I somehow hit the right combination and my fingerprints were being read successfully.

Thankfully the Linux community is pretty massive now, especially around debian based distros, so there's usually someone out there with your issue.

But sometimes you end up with a similar situation as this:

You know windows does all that automagically, too, right?

The only reason I was manually installing a driver is because I wanted a different version to the one automatically selected by Windows (print driver: installing it locally makes my printer print when its out of ink, installing the network driver from the machine makes it refuse to print due to having no ink (even though there's clearly loads left). So that's a samsung issue, rather than an MS one. The other driver I had to do manually is the driver for my Via HD Audio chipset. Windows installed one and it works fine, but the manufacturer supplied one includes a license for SoundBlaster Cinema, which does an OK job of making my laptop speakers sound not quite as crap (although it refuses to work in Windows 10, and causes a BSOD with a graphics driver related issue which is nice!) . Again - that's a manufacturer caused situation, rather than MS. 

Beyond that, I haven't had to manually download and install a driver in years (since XP, probably, although even that got drivers via Windows Update in the end). It works essentially the fucking same on both platforms.

>Maybe I did wilfully misinterpret what you wrote, but maybe you also wilfully wanted me to misinterpret it?

:?

What? It wasn't even directed at you. It was a jokey response to Kos's moan about printer drivers.

>One as in the royal one, right?

There's isn't a royal one. There is a royal 'we'. One just means the same to everyone.

>Does anyone (except those that are stuck on Windows XP) really have to worry about making sure their drivers are up to date any more?

People who play games (like me) tend to want the latest graphics (and other) drivers and the ones provided by Windows update often aren't or are fiddled with in various ways.

Also it sometimes simply doesn't work and either gets the wrong drivers or none at all. When it does work it's slow and requires reboots (less so, but it still does). And when I say slow it's really fucking slow. Installing stuff, then rebooting, then somehow still installing stuff before it'll let you back into Windows and then rebooting some more (worst case scenario, of course, but this shit does happen and not that seldom.. And even in the best case it's painfully slow).

But yeah, neither OS is perfect, that's for sure. As a user I much prefer Linux's approach to drivers. For a long time it meant, as you describe, a lot of pain, before (virtually) everything got a basic level of support. But these days it's, in most cases, pretty seamless and completely automatic. It's really nice to have some pretty obscure hardware supported out of the box (WiiMotes for example, used them in a recent project. Just plugged them in and they worked. No downloads, no reboots.)

But yeah, my point in this thread was not to diss Windows. It's totally fine and 10 is a reasonable improvement over 7 (and a huge improvement over 8). There are things *I* don't like about it, which is why I don't use it, but I could.

My point was more about the underlying tech and questioning MS's future (in terms of desktop OSes). Again, not to bash MS, they've done some truly amazing stuff and I have nowt against them. More as just... an interesting (to me at least) topic.









 

Yeah that situation (as per the XKCD) is a fucker.

I find that to be the worst with Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros. The fairly rapid point-release approach means fixes/info goes out of date really fast.

The Arch Wiki is pretty great (regardless of distro). It covers a lot of stuff and is always up to date. It can usually be used on other distros to at least get clues.

I keep meaning to give Arch a go, and I know you keep telling me to.

Yeah, I've ended up on the Arch wiki many a time for info.

It's a degree of effort to set up (it's by no means hard, but there is effort). But once it's set up (and you're in the mindset) it's so nice. So utterly free of the usual hassles.

I get to hear it everytime my pc boots!

I love the cartoon! lol