[astrobe_]

One could fit about 10 Linux live distros in those 20Gb. Those "few hundreds of kilobytes" are indeed trivial.

[21]

Windows comes with a ton of builtin drivers. So it will work with a lot of devices out of the box without needing an Internet connection to update.

[icebraining]

Same is true in most Linux distros. My stock Debian kernel comes with 2300+ drivers, and which only take ~130MB.

[pikzen]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2008/11/19/disk-space/

Bear in mind, that was the Vista days, and Windows 10 now supports even more devices. 800MB of drivers at the time. I would not be surprised if Windows supported by default upwards of 10000 drivers. It works pretty much flawlessly on even somewhat obscure and old hardware. And when your OS is installed on that many consumer devices, and not informally standardized servers, you are going to meet those weird devices one way or the other.

Windows drivers may also take up a bit more space individually because of the overhead caused by either the Windows Driver Model or Windows Driver Framework, but that's the price to pay to not have a driver crashing and bringing down your entire system. Yes, Linux, I'm looking at you.

[simooooo]

None of them are ever for any of my hardware

[cmdrfred]

I have the opposite experience myself.

[Something1234]

What hardware are you using that the defaults don't work?

[bastawhiz]

I've installed the latest Ubuntu in 2016 to find my mouse, wifi, and printer did not work. And my Cinema Display was stuck at 1024x768.

[astrobe_]

The second thing you want to make work is probably the network anyway, so I don't really see where's the quality here.