Also, I installed Linux many, many times and it has been much smoother than windows. Even excluding privacy stuff. Even assuming one has a Microsoft Account at hand and internet. There have been multiple instances of drivers simply missing from the installer. Like Mouse/Touchpad drivers. Or disk drivers. Literally making it impossible to install Windows, without either great knowledge of the cmd, or traversing each and everything, including the traps and bullshit M$ placed into the installer on purpose, via keyboard. Debian, Pop, Arch and other liveboots worked perfectly fine.
There have been multiple instances of drivers simply missing from the installer. Like Mouse/Touchpad drivers. Or disk drivers.
This, 100% irks me to this day, but not as much as their broken reinventions of the wheel for an attempt to make it more ‘user friendly’ to install drivers automatically, that is if the user knows what Device Manager is, where to find it, etc. And then they broke that, and decided to include everything into windows update.
Did you know MS scans for drivers and uploads them automatically to their database, just to be paired based on the Hardware ID? I only see so much potential for malicious drivers with fake signatures its unbelievable, I am legit surprised no one has come with a PoC so far (and if you’re interested on working on it, send me a message, I’m kinda interested too)
I really miss the old XP days were you knew you had a driver disc somewhere, and could pop it in after a fresh install and let it do its thing. And the disc came with your motherboard / new hardware directly from the retailer.
We don’t really need driver discs anymore - at least, between my Steelseries Headset, Sharkoon Keyboard and Logitech Mouse, the only thing needing extra drivers were my NVidia GPU (switched to an AMD one), and my Laptops fingerprint sensor. Which I uninstalled again, because it’s more of a hassle to move my finger to it than to type my pw in. The problem nowadays is rather specific software for controlling eg. RGB, but OpenRGB and piper have me mostly covered.
I know back then we needed drivers for speakers, I remember the AC’97 hardware being more reliable and accessible than the HDAU, but a KB & Mouse?
The reason why you feel we don’t need driver discs anymore is because the internet allows you to download the windows binaries directly from nvidia.com but what would be the case if I wanted to set up a gaming station in a remote area? And also make sure that a flash drive won’t die, get lost or lose its contents over time for electron decay?
The other day I got an enterprise 10G NIC and it came with a driver disc lol. Is Intel X520 based.
True, if you jump into the cold water and do everything yourself, eg. compiling client software yourself, you may also need to compile drivers. But for everyday use cases, installing the client software from the repos just has a dependency on the drivers, and you don’t have to (but maybe could) even think about it.
LibreOffice Calc?
Also, I installed Linux many, many times and it has been much smoother than windows. Even excluding privacy stuff. Even assuming one has a Microsoft Account at hand and internet. There have been multiple instances of drivers simply missing from the installer. Like Mouse/Touchpad drivers. Or disk drivers. Literally making it impossible to install Windows, without either great knowledge of the cmd, or traversing each and everything, including the traps and bullshit M$ placed into the installer on purpose, via keyboard. Debian, Pop, Arch and other liveboots worked perfectly fine.
This, 100% irks me to this day, but not as much as their broken reinventions of the wheel for an attempt to make it more ‘user friendly’ to install drivers automatically, that is if the user knows what Device Manager is, where to find it, etc. And then they broke that, and decided to include everything into windows update.
Did you know MS scans for drivers and uploads them automatically to their database, just to be paired based on the Hardware ID? I only see so much potential for malicious drivers with fake signatures its unbelievable, I am legit surprised no one has come with a PoC so far (and if you’re interested on working on it, send me a message, I’m kinda interested too)
I really miss the old XP days were you knew you had a driver disc somewhere, and could pop it in after a fresh install and let it do its thing. And the disc came with your motherboard / new hardware directly from the retailer.
We don’t really need driver discs anymore - at least, between my Steelseries Headset, Sharkoon Keyboard and Logitech Mouse, the only thing needing extra drivers were my NVidia GPU (switched to an AMD one), and my Laptops fingerprint sensor. Which I uninstalled again, because it’s more of a hassle to move my finger to it than to type my pw in. The problem nowadays is rather specific software for controlling eg. RGB, but OpenRGB and piper have me mostly covered.
I know back then we needed drivers for speakers, I remember the AC’97 hardware being more reliable and accessible than the HDAU, but a KB & Mouse?
The reason why you feel we don’t need driver discs anymore is because the internet allows you to download the windows binaries directly from nvidia.com but what would be the case if I wanted to set up a gaming station in a remote area? And also make sure that a flash drive won’t die, get lost or lose its contents over time for electron decay?
The other day I got an enterprise 10G NIC and it came with a driver disc lol. Is Intel X520 based.
True, if you jump into the cold water and do everything yourself, eg. compiling client software yourself, you may also need to compile drivers. But for everyday use cases, installing the client software from the repos just has a dependency on the drivers, and you don’t have to (but maybe could) even think about it.
The other day I compiled libreboot. It was a fun experience.