unholy software..

https://sh.itjust.works/post/4119044

I have never had problems with Nvidia drivers on Linux mint detects them and ask if you want to install the official drivers

They're supposed to buy an AMD card, obviously. /s

Use POP OS which has NVIDIA Drivers in the iso

...to let the distro pick the best driver for you? That's what I do at least.

I'm starting to wonder if this is a meme or if people are actually having problems.

Suffer. It’s ok I’m used to suffering for graphics cards. Thanks bitcoin!

It depends on your distro

cry because no Wayland

Yeah, I also dont get it. Most drivers by default are for windows. I have no idea how those people managed to get this confused on windows, of all OSs. Part of me thinks that its just linux circlejerk and bandwagon, but some of those has to be true.

The problem is maintaining the os. Installing the drivers on windows is usually fine. Maintaining them is frustrating, because of how updates has to be done, and the dirty uninstall process, and the issues.

On many Linux distro it doesn't work perfectly, but maintenance is so trivial that people become used to it. And going back to a high maintenance OS is annoying. Like going back from a modern EV to ford model T. Some people like the experience of going back in time to the mid 90s with Windows, other prefer the simplicity of maintaining a Linux OS

Yes for stupid stuff like turning off the network device, to cut access to the internet. Windows finds by itself that the network device is disconnected and reconnects it by itself. Granted it's not much, but it's as complicated to find that menu than to run that utility.

Has the annoying "search for a solution" window ever found a solution?

Actually yes. In W7, at least, anytime sound wasn't doing what it should have the "search for solution" button would fix it right up. The first time it gave and performed a solution and worked I was dumbfounded.

huh every time I plug my Logitech receiver in a different port I get a notification about a driver installation, fortunately it's almost instant on my new pc but it's still weird that we need that in 2023

I still have it from time to time that Windows has to install a driver for something benign like a thumb drive. Not always, though. And yes, the driver is fixed to the physical port. Using a different port reinstalls the same driver again.

Experienced this exact behavior on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11.

I see it regularly with Win10, and I also see plenty of PCs in my job.

I once was fixing someones computer booting with Bluescreen, because Windows 7 thought it found newer drivers for USB 3.1, and those newer were causing BSOD

I've seen this so often on Windows Vista, and I've never seen it on Windows 10.

Granted, I've switched USBs in the meantime, so maybe it's just the USB?

Printers in general are the devil regardless of OS.

If there exists a hell, especially built for IT, it's filled with printers.

nVidia has entered the chat

Yeah I was very confused. Only thing one needs to install nowadays is mesa and the correct Vulkan loader

I've just been using Windows for work stuff now and then for over two decades now - so I just have the install scripted so I can just deploy it from scratch whenever I need it, and throw it away afterwards. Before we had multicore CPUs making emulation not annoying I had a sun workstation with a SunPCI card for that.

The one constant over all windows versions is it running into some driver issues for stupid reasons. Now with 11 its the signed drivers - and while you can do exceptions for development I never got unsigned graphics drivers to work.

Also, Windows on ARM is horrible - something as simple as a usb serial adapter doesn't work because there just are no ARM drivers.

You forgot that you were using arch, btw.

You should get into crossfit. Or ultramarathons.

I installed Windows (both 10 & 11) last month on separate occasions, it took nearly 45m for it to install (with both 10 & 11), on top of that Windows 11 fucked up the first time around & I had to do it again. All to just update the BIOS because HP sucks.

When a Linux distro like Linux Mint installs in 5m-10m flat on the same exact device, first time around ever time.

Linux doesn't need AV software, "security by design" is a key principle of Linux, and I don't even think Windows itself actually "needs" AV software. It's called common sense.

Automatically installing drivers won't work if your WiFi card is unsupported out of the box like others have mentioned, especially with Windows 11 where you need internet to even install it the official "Microsoft way". While Linux has all such supported drivers built-in and can provide support for these devices long past their EOL on Windows.
Nvidia drivers will auto install on Linux distros such as Mint too.

Windows 10 is a great OS, it's hilarious how people attempt to pretend it's not.

Nobody said it wasn't, his comment comes off more as shitting on HP than Windows; we just don't ignore it's downside when looking at the whole picture.
Also Windows 11 is arguably worse than Windows 10.

Each OS has pros & cons and it's important to look at each closely without assuming someone else is in fairyland because they chose a different OS then you, if you're not careful you may find yourself in the very fairyland you're accusing others of being in.

You take the mouse and do clicky clicky. Luckily theres usually one control panel on linux in contrast to three more and more legacy versions in windows where you need to go three levels deep in order to change the local ip address.

I literally click one button and it starts the entire automated update process. The only interruption is asking for a password

You probably never used Linux. Or you used it 20 years ago.

Imagine thinking the terminal is something to be forced into.

First off, you really don't need the terminal if you choose to avoid it. You can get by just fine with a GUI package manager included in the "user-friendly" Linux distros; which is essentially a graphical app store that handles all installs, uninstalls, updates & system updates for you with a point and click.

Second :
Tab key, Auto completion, command cycling, command highlighting, man pages, TLDR pages, and so on.
There's no; absolutely 0, zippo, nada; reason you should, need, or want to remember individual commands or how to use them when the previously mentioned exist.

On the other hand, it takes only four letters and hitting enter for me to update everything installed on my pc so not that hard to memorize a few commands.

If you have to do that to install anything, it's either always your package manager or something that can be copy-pasted from the included installation guide.

You don't even need the terminal in most cases. You have GUIs. Simple ones.

I'd rather have to type a line than struggle with installing 10 pieces of unnecessary bloatware individually

Lmao. "Unless you're in the majority of PC gamers then it's not a problem" Linux users I swear

apt install nvidia-driver

Most gamers use nvidia.

The average person uses integrated intel or amd graphics.

Also WiFi

I have a 4k laptop display and use it alongside 2 1080 monitors just fine nowadays, Wayland handles that no problem

AFAIK HDR support still sucks though

HDR support is almost finished, raytracing is pretty much rolled out, certain drm works such as Netflix.

There is Aptx HD support, but I believe they're reverse engineering I'm sure Aptx LL will come eventually (or Qualcomm makes it easy). I have a friend that uses Aptx/ldac but I haven't bothered myself.

It seems the only things that don't work are tied to stereotypical anticompetitive companies refusing to support. Which is a shame because it's capable of exceeding the other platforms in ease of use.

Inkscape is not on par.

I don't Mint the uncalled, ty.

I kind of like Windows 11, but even the Pro version is riddled with ads. The search banner in the taskbar has them regularly, there's a large number of falsely installed Microsoft Store apps in the Start menu (which get downloaded when you click them, like Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Instagram, I think also TikTok and I'm certainly forgetting some), the whole "news" menu on the left side of the screen is just that too. The Windows 10 default Mail app (which I think is close to be the perfect email app on Windows) is also being retired in favor of Outlook, the free version of which has an ad displayed either as a banner at the bottom of your mails list, or as an unread email at the top of it. This prompted me to enjoy the Thunderbird update, which isn't as good but has no ads. And that's not even counting Edge, the shortcut of which gets added back to the desktop on a regular basis, which redirects all HTML help pages and searches to itself instead of using the default browser.

You might not have seen any ads on your W11 computer, but it's probably either because you have a system-wide adblocker, installed scripts to remove some of the most invasive bloat, or simply hand pick and manage carefully all apps and and settings on your systems (that's what I do, but when I do I make it so I won't see it again). Or you don't notice them as ads, which is sadly very possible.

Are you using home or enterprise?

You mus have a nice install. I see them when I press the windows button. I see them when I press a random combination and this wierd left side window pops up and task bar shows you not only weather but also shares.

Might sound stupid, but I want to be apathetic about my OS. I mainly game and I have been using Windows since I was 8. I know it in and out and if I am not forced to (or if ads really get that crazy), I am not gonna switch. It's just nothing I am remotely passionate about.

I haven’t tried to use Linux for desktop in a while, probably as long as they haven’t used windows. Because in my mind what they said is 100% backwards.

Seems like both have matured quite a bit

And Windows update takes care of 99.9% of missing drivers automatically.

You're right about the network drivers, but on things like serial drivers, Windows is a fucking nightmare. Hell, I can't use some devices because FTDI drivers will brick the device if it decides its a knockoff of their chip. Getting anything working that isn't consumer grade is a shit show.

Make that 2 decades I gather. Maybe even 3. This sounds like nt4 territory. Maybe barelu6 win2k.

I was a windows user up until about a year and a half ago, and had this issue as recently as Windows 10. I had to use my phone as a tether to go download the drivers for my TP-Link Archer T6E. Also had the issue with my MSI z97m Gaming where I had to go find drivers for the built-in wired network adapter, again using my phone as a tether, on Windows 8.1

Since drivers are so specifc, people's anecdotal experiences with having to install them is never going to be shared.

IE, I had to install a wired NIC driver just last month on a fresh Windows 10 22H2 for a Dell laptop that was no more than a few years old.

Idk, I just built a PC with Realtek mobo integrated wifi, we couldn't even install the OS because it didn't detect the NIC and Windows forced us to sign in before it would continue the installation.

Had to lug the machine to a router to get anywhere, and still had to download the Asus mobo software to get the wireless going. Wasn't convenient in the least.

When I last installed Windows I had to google where do download Libreoffice, Firefox, Steam, Audacity, VLC, Gimp and a lot more software.

On Linux most came preinstalled, the rest was one click in the Repository ("Store" for Generation Smartphone)

Yeah the last time I had to install drivers for a network card on Windows was over a decade ago

I had to install a network adapter driver the other day. Had to use my wife's computer to download into a flash drive and bring it over to my computer with zero network connectivity.

Granted, this only happened because my network card was broken.

Yeah I've installed Windows about ten times in the last ten years for various people and I've never encountered any of this. It is as close to flawless as I can ask for.

I had the ethernet in my desktop mobo not work when I tried upgrading to win11. Worked fine in 10 but no internet on 11.

I also had a very difficult time getting a Xbox wireless controller adapter working on win 10 without spending about 2 hours searching.

Windows usually works but sometimes it just fucking doesn't. Linux isn't perfect either but I usually don't have issues with my Ethernet ports not working.

Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5 Gen 8 Notebook comes with a MEDIATEK MT7922. Windows 11 does not want to install unless you circumvent the requirement for Internet or supply it with a manually downloaded driver.

Linux? Just works.

TP-Link Archer T6E, one of the most popular on the market

You'd have more driver issues with Windows if you used hardware that wasn't already being sold with Windows pre-installed by OEMs/system integrators. Comparatively Linux supports a wider verity of hardware for much longer, Windows on the other hand only really supports consumer grade hardware that's likely to have it pre-installed anyway with a limited (and often predestined) EOL.

If manufacturers treated Linux desktop as first class like with Windows or Linux on Servers then there'd be a very small amount of unsupported & likely obsolete hardware.

Do you realize WINXP is TWENTY FOUR years old now???

I'm pretty sure the blame is on the device manufacturer here

How long ago was this exactly?

ISA cards? That's not even comparable. That's 90s era, 30 years ago, 20 at best. Things have changed.

On one side it is a rare sight to need to install a driver for Linux. I had an Star NL24-10 printer with an IEEE-488 connector for the C64.

INSANE! Linux natively supports C64 peripherals.

I build a simple adaptor from Parallel to IEEE-488-Serial and when I told CUPS the printer was on /dev/ieee488 it immediately found it. Insane. Oh, the Floppy was also available, at least at sector Level though there actually is no C1541 Filesystem so I had to open it in Starcommander, some sort of Norton/Midnite-Commander, which officially supports those images.

The amount of supported hardware is INSANE. You will get stuff working which works nowhere else.

The coolest shit are Host-Based Storage Systems, with the most known group as Memory-Technology-Devices. For example there are SMR-Harddisks where I can change the SMR-Layout from my computer. I can say "50% capacity CMR, 50% SMR". Or Host-Based-QLC-Drives where you can select for each MinWriteCell how to use it: As ultra-Fast SLC/MLC, as the middle TLC or as the superslow QLC. Sure, it costs Capacity. But the choice ist yours. I bought a Data-Center-Intel-QLC-Drive and converted it to 50% MLC at 3.5GByte/s sustained and 50% QLC with 0.5Gbyte/s. Sure, it reduced the capacity of the 4TByte Drive to 3TByte. But who cares if it is so fast it blows anything away. On Windows you can not even detect those drives.

But: If you have a really bad case of "unsupported hardware" then things get complicated fast.

On Arch they're usually right in the AUR. I imagine there's people adding them to the new AUR-like Debian repo which name I can't remember rn.

If it's not in the Kernel, write a driver and upstream it. Be a man.

First: Linux is the street racing scene of the PC world. You can customize everything, and it's going to be faster and more responsive. Also if someone just wants to build a really cool custom experience, there's very cool stuff possibld do on Windows, but that road eventually leads to Linux.

Second: Linux is the long haul huge truck engine of the Internet. Big data processing only runs on Linux*. I've met one Windows supercomputer and one Mac supercomputer. Both are long retired now.

*The interesting exception to this is payments processing, which has a lot of Windows and Mainframe still. But while that workload is big, it's dwarfed by the Internet backbone and supercomputer jobs that run on Linux.

Something like 99.9% of the Internet now runs on Linux.**

**Please no one reply to me about your .Net shop. I've worked at them too, but they're a substantial minority now, and they still mostly deploy to Azure which is mostly running Linux.

Third: Free stuff. Most open source software is written for Linux, and only ported to Windows after it gets really popular. So on Linux, your options for good free software are much nicer.

As a software engineer, the nicest thing is that the whole programming ecosystem integrates with Linux. Git, SSH, Docker, you get natively in your OS. Even dumb shit like file path separators, line-endings, file permissions. Most programming languages make the assumption that you're on a UNIX system (Linux, macOS, BSD).

Aside from that, Linux is fucking awesome as an SE, because everything is open-source. Find a bug in a program you use? You can fix it, if you want. Want to learn how a specific program works? Just look at the source code. Or its config file. Or its logs. Everything wants to teach you about itself.

And personally, I also just love the usability. The built-in file manager, terminal, PDF viewer etc. are good. The built-in text editor is no IDE, but it's up-to-snuff with Notepad++.
And I'm making these blanket statements despite there not being one built-in anything. You can choose between multiple GUI bundles (so-called "desktop environments"). From a minimal DIY setup (i3wm etc.) all the way to maximally feature-rich goodness (KDE). You don't have to use the same limited setup as your granny uses to launch a browser. You can customize everything to your needs and you get tons of power-user features.

Linux by itself is just a kernel, there's a whole range of operating systems using it. Most of them have some commonalities, but there are also huge differences. Most of them can run directly from a USB stick (or in a VM obviously), so you can try some out.

Some things that basically all of them do very well, compared to windows:

• mainly open source components (+- some proprietary drivers and apps, if you want)

• no ads in the OS

• support for very old hardware, being (depending on actual OS more or less) light and resource efficient

• very good package management

• customizability

There are many things that are specific to some OSes. I switched from Windows 10 years ago, and I can't see myself going back. Everytime I have to use it somewhere, I get annoyed quickly.

There are some drawbacks:

• software has to be built against a specific kernel, and some proprietary software is not offered for linux. There are compatability layers for running windows software on linux without emulation, but they are mainly optimized for games (I've had windows-only games run faster on linux than on windows!).

• some drivers are unavailable for linux, as the device manufacturers have to cooperate somewhat. However, almost everything will work.

• some drivers are available, but require binary blobs distributed by the manufacturer. The proprierary NVidia drivers, for example, are faster than the open source reimplementation noveau, but they can cause problems with some software like sway. If you have an AMD gpu, their open source drivers are great, so no problems.

Roughly all the servers (including Microsofts own cloud), half the mobile systems, lots of the larger embedded stuff and some small percentage of deksktop systems are using Linux. Again, just try something (maybe Pop!_OS or Mint) and see if you like it.

Nothing is truly unfixable, it just might require kernel modding that no one has done before.

Bluetooth is anything but simple. It's a hackjob upon hackjob of hackjobs. While it's true that linux implementation is also a bit of a hack, I remember the constant headache I had when all my peripherals were on bluetooth, and the pain of switching them all between windows PC and android phone. Never again, I'll take the wires instead, thanks

Yeah, you gotta look for Bluetooth receivers that have proper support. Some laptop receivers won't work correctly - its only a select few receivers that actually have reliable drivers.

I myself use a Xbox one x|s controller wirelessly using the xpadneo driver. My first issue was the fact that the first USB Bluetooth receiver I bought didn't work - turns out that certain Bluetooth receiver models you can buy from eBay/Amazon are often bootlegs of other models, and these bootlegs are just different enough that you have to modify the kernel to adjust for the quirks.

Given that USB Bluetooth receivers are cheap, (was like $20 Aussie dollars) I just bought another one and that one actually did work, instead of working out how to modify the driver.

Then I found that Xbox one controllers have this weird quirk due to the BTLE authentication system it has that results in it unable to stay permanently connected - it would constantly loop between connected and disconnected, at first I tried every method for getting it to work, and the only one that worked was that I had to attach my USB receiver to a windows VM, pair it, go into the windows registry to grab the auth key, and then implant it in the Linux Bluetooth configuration. Only then did it work flawlessly.

Problem is it's a lot of fucking effort for a layman to attempt to work out and setup. And you also have to have either a windows machine, or a windows VM to connect the receiver you plan to use with the controller into.

But once you do it, the controller will always work on the PC, with that receiver. And you never need to worry about it untill you decide to reinstall linux- but in that case you just copy the same key across Linux installs.

Note: I don't dual boot, but sometimes the dual boot method is the only way to get things to work Here's the archwiki article I used to work out how to do it, only I used a windows VM instead of a second windows partition.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/bluetooth

Here's a list of good and bad dongles from the xpadneo Bluetooth page:

https://atar-axis.github.io/xpadneo/#bt-dongles

Huh, for me bluetooth headsets are the one kind of peripheral that work better on Linux than windows.

DKMS is what you want rather than do it manually.

The original meme had a Bible, so you can guess the rest of the comic

Correction: I doubt anyone can guess the rest of the comic, that's how out there it is