I thought I’d chuck windows on my gaming laptop an Acer nitro 5 from last year, to see how it’s going do some bits I can’t on Linux VR, certain multiplayer games etc.
What a disaster! I’ve spent the whole day brute forcing drivers and generally dicking about trying to get my setup sorted.
Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don’t exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you’re on Wi-Fi. Mint’s had this since what 2006? But that’s cool, Cortana is here to chat away and not understand any requests. Once finally in the OS after 20 questions that could be considered harassment if it was a person, nothing was ready to go. Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.
People have the cheek to complain about Linux’s Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn’t already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.
Plug in my sound card OK it’s a bit old now UA-25 but nothing happens…hmm find obscure video partially install a driver from Vista then cancel the installation program so you can side load a driver from 8,1 but wait there’s more disable core isolation to allow the driver to work reboot into a now slightly more compromised OS.
OK plug in wheel again not new stuff G25 oh it works cool. Oh, no H-shifter OK download driver. “Can’t find device, ensure it’s plugged in”. Windows decided it knew better, downloaded its own driver that blocks the official one and loads a steering wheel as a gamepad…GG cool cool.
I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything. It does worse than nothing, it thinks it’s smart enough to carry out tasks on the user behalf and just bork it.
All of these issues are because I don’t have the new shiny things, but it really highlighted why I love Linux now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to install a distro and play on my 20-year-old peripherals
From what I got online that computer has either an Intel or MediaTek PCIe Wifi card, both of them should be supported out of the box by Windows. Also you aren’t required to install GPU drivers manually, just run Windows Update and it will pull the driver including the Nvidia panel for you.
I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything.
Because it is as long as you don’t fuck things up because you think you know better. Just use Windows update to pull GPU drivers… or download what Acer says is for your computer on their support page… cheap ass hardware that shouldn’t even be on the market doesn’t help either.
I think the problem stems from the time period in Windows history where we transitioned from “the user has to install all drivers from a CD/manufacturers website” to “windows goes and finds drivers for you”, to what windows does now, where it grabs the correct drivers for you (I think? I don’t use windows anymore).
That intermediary step where windows would do a windows update and grab drivers Willy nilly for you and they weren’t correct, would mean, if you didn’t have a video card driver installed, then, yes, windows would install one for you But not the correct one for your card, it would install a generic one, so you have some amount of 2d/3d support. You could get the correct resolution for your HD monitor, or watch videos without stuttering, bit it did not give you the full 3d support for your card. So gaming wouldn’t work well. So once again, if you knew what you were doing, you had to ignore the fact that windows found a driver and installed it, and you had to hunt down the correct driver for your video card, from manufacturer website and install that.
Windows used to the the same stuff with sound cards too. You’d have a Creative sound blaster, 5.1 blah, blah, blah. And windows would install a generic sound card driver that maybe gave you like 2.1 sound or maybe it gave you all 5.1, but didn’t install the control panel from Creative so you couldn’t configure your card at all. So yes, your card, technically worked, but it didn’t work correctly, unless you knew enough to install the manufacturers driver instead.
Now I think windows just pulls down a some 3rd party software center from intel, or nvidia, etc, that scans your hardware, and grabs the correct driver for you. But that intermediary step before we got here? Caused a lot of confusion.
it grabs the correct drivers for you (I think? I don’t use windows anymore).
Yes it does grab the right things without fail. Hardware identification is trivial at this point, all have their IDs.
windows would install one for you But not the correct one for your card, it would install a generic one, so you have some amount of 2d/3d support. You could get the correct resolution for your HD monitor, or watch videos without stuttering, bit it did not give you the full 3d support for your card. So gaming wouldn’t work well.
Yes, I remember those times, but we’re past that.
Nowadays it is usually better to let Windows grab drivers for you because it will grab the driver and no other extra crap. A lot of devices come with useless bundled software and Microsoft is very strict when it comes to installing software with the drivers - they only do it for GPUs, sound cards and a couple exceptions - guess that Microsoft now wants an monopoly on who can install crapware in your system as well :P
There are a few exceptions to this, special hardware that isn’t properly registered on the Windows Update catalog and Windows won’t pull drivers, for those cases people should head into the support page of their device and download drivers from there. Some brands may also make this easier, for instance HP has a tool that will detect your machine model and download and install the required drivers.
It’s actually worse! Last jan Microsoft bricked the entire fleet of laptops in my company with a borked generic driver update. It overwrote the sd reader’s vendor driver blocking all storage access from working whatsoever. From one week to another more or less all devices refused to boot. They basically killed our entire company for half a week, until IT could walk people through efi-disabling the sd reader in every laptop (recent industrial models mind you) just because windows had pulled in the wrong driver. So… no - it’s not great at all with automatic driver installation in windows …
Installing an operating system is a process that’s full of potential to be very painful no matter what the operating system is. All 3 major operating systems do their best to make it as painless as possible, but if you stray from the happy path, it requires technical knowledge to fix that most people don’t have. So the bottom line is that the OS which can make deals with manufacturers to pre install their OS with confirmed working drivers will seem more user friendly than the OS you have to install yourself. If you gift a moon a System 76 laptop and ask them to install Windows on it, they’re gonna balk at you the same ways as they would if it’s the reverse.
Well said
I’ve fully given up on vr in Linux after spending a whole day trying to get it to work. I have Nobara and modern AMD hardware, tried SteamVR and FOSS VR (envision) (which was awful to set up on the “gaming OS”). I booted into my windows partition, clicked a button to update AMD Adrenalin (and several years of windows updates) and VR simply worked.
I love Linux but it definitely has its own issues. My boss (who got me into Linux) vented some of his frustrations with Linux while installing Android studio: “linux makes up a few percentage of the userbase but 90% of the OS’s. It’s far too splintered.” I have to agree, and it’s why i will likely always have a windows partition. Because things just work, and if they don’t I have a wealth of information on the internet because there is only one OS people can have this problem with.
I think the valve and the steam deck is doing the linux community a massive solid and somewhat unifying the Linux gaming community.
VR seems to be one of the last things that does not work. My Index is laggy af on Ubuntu and Fedora but completely fine on windows.
windows
Wrong community.
The pretentiousness is off the scales with this one
accurate tho
i had to manually disable driver updates via windows update because it picks the shittiest possible drivers for everything
Built a PC for my cousin, Windows likes to delete its own Wi-Fi driver among other issues, not to mention using modern Microsoft products feels like a rectal probing with how invasive it is.
Weird I’ve never had to manually install a driver for windows.
Actually, both Ubuntu and Mint didn’t have wifi drivers for my late-2014 Mac Mini (Intel based). I had to plugin ethernet so I could actually download the drivers. Also, the version of Windows you might have installed might have been older than your PC, so no drivers would naturally be in it (e.g. Win11 is already 2-3 years old).
Actually, both Ubuntu and Mint didn’t have wifi drivers for my late-2014 Mac Mini (Intel based).
It’s a Mac… the shittiest hardware in existence to try and install anything else but OSX. Until asahi linux, there was no concerted and funded effort to make linux run on the mac.
No, it’s not the shittiest hardware in existence. The wifi in question was just Broadcomm, not Apple. The Apple-based Macs are just PCs, with a modified UEFI firmware, nothing else. Only the Silicon-based ones are more Apple-based.
Lol I still have the CDs that came with my first built PC parts just to install the drivers because windows would never use the correct one even when the OEM had them very easily online.
Have a complete CD for my monitor, GTX 750ti, and motherboard. Actually had to use mobo CD to get ethernet working (killer ethernet e2400) and I think I might have used nvidia CD or just gone straight to GeForce download.
I can’t believe I can actually say linux has had a working kernel module since at least 2013 but Windows 10 didn’t
Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.
Windows update on W11 will pull basically everything automatically, with the exception of some older proprietary hardware (a lot of gaming and sound devices have really screwed up drivers for example).
Drivers are extremely hit or miss on Linux too especially for anything new, and manually installing some driver is incredibly frustrating since you can’t just run an exe and be done.
People have the cheek to complain about Linux’s Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn’t already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.
It’s the same on windows, go to nvidia website and download the driver and install.
The last part you mention is not a comparison how it is better but rather to put the idea away that its hard to install nvidia drivers on Linux
Sounds like a user problem. Installing windows should take 30 minutes tops.
I can’t say I’ve ever had this experience with installing drivers on Windows. Is it as smooth and centralized as Linux? No, but it’s generally just go to manufacturers website, find product, find support page, locate drivers, download/install, rinse and repeat. Never had to go watch videos that led me to a partial install of drivers for an outdated Windows version. If WiFi doesn’t work, use USB tethering from your phone. The laptop will act like it’s connected to Ethernet (this at least lets you go to the Acer website to find the right WiFi drivers for your laptop).
Also never had Cortana bother me during setup. You can always skip all that extra crap. Last time I installed Win10 was to update my NVidia GPU firmware and it took 10 minutes.
Windows and Linux have opposite problems for starters with newer hardware better supported on Windows and old hardware supported on Linux. As Linux gets more popular, it will start to shine because if newer hardware becomes better supported, the experience will truly be that Linux just works and Windows needs drivers for done stuff.
The other big factor is that Windows is already installed. So, you don’t have to do anything or, at most, one or two things. Even if that one thing is hard, you are more likely to blame that one thing than Windows.
Finally, we have to acknowledge that your experience sounds atypical for Windows installs. Most of my hardware is easier to put Linux on than Windows but I doubt any of them would be that hard.
We also have to admit that Linux does not have drivers for everything while Windows basically does ( somewhere ). So, Linux can be the bigger bummer overall. Of course, this is in the x86-64 universe only. Linux has vastly better hardware support when you consider other platforms.
Drivers for desktops are pretty much a non-issue on Windows, in fact, most will be installed via the internet before you even boot the desktop for the first time.
Drivers for gaming laptops are a nightmare on Windows, and you’ll probably have to chase weird slow pages in the manufacturer’s website to perhaps find 4 packages that might contain the driver you want.
Or upu just download the ryzen or Intel softwsre/chipset drivers and it’s all sorted. Though for gaming laptops chasing down means going to the manufacturer support site for that specific model…
I have clean installed windows on a lot of gaming laptops. Most of the time windows updates pulls in every driver for you if windows have the correct wifi driver to begin with. If it doesn’t i just download wifi driver on my phone and transfer it.
This is mostly an Acer issue I think. A decent vendor will have a software package or even their website that will handle updating your drivers.
Surprise! They virtually all do, but they didn’t look.
Huh? I’m all for d***riding on Linux but this is a weird case. I’ve not had a single issue with windows on gaming laptops even across multiple reinstalls. They’re all automatically installed soon after you boot. Just need to wait through a few updates.
Yeah I’ve never had a missing driver problem with a windows install since maybe windows 7. I even moved a hard drive with a windows 8 install from an Asus laptop with an Intel cpu to a custom build desktop with a ryzen cpu without having to change any drivers. I did have to reactivate windows because of the hardware change but that’s it.
The included drivers are often providing less performance than updated ones from the vendor though, so it is recommended to download those in some cases, specifically nvidia. But most gaming laptops will have a vendor provided update center to manage all of that for you.
I like Linux over windows for a lot of reasons but this post is a bit silly.
