[frollogaston]

If you want it to be comparable to the partner-provided drivers in Windows Update, there must be situations you install them from outside, right? Like Canon and HP have printer driver downloads for Linux. Or maybe the built-in generic one is good enough already.

[eddythompson80]

It's been decades for me since I've had a machine with an important device that is completely "unrecognizable" without a custom driver. Generic drivers work for almost everything.

Because Windows gets direct support from most HW vendors, it's generic drivers don't have to be as good as Linux's in general, but still they work fine.

Printers are very special case. They are a shitshow in different ways between Windows and Linux.

Windows printer support is from like 1920s or some shit and they can't change it and it's just bad. BUT, if you have weird ass Xerox or HP with crazy features like a printer that will print, stable, copy, re-copy, and then automatically shred the documents and their copies is likely to only ever be controllable through some HP software from 2006 that hasn't been updated since then but somehow still works on Windows.

On linux, you get much better printing service and generic support, but depending on the popularity of your office printer and the popularity of particular feature you're trying to use, it might not be in the drivers.

[frollogaston]

Well I also just realized, Linux kernel is only going to include open-source drivers which some vendors annoyingly won't give, while Microsoft doesn't care.