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by biomechanica 5019 days ago
Under which distro did your GRUB break?

Anyway, Ubuntu has become the norm in my parents household. Yes, a new laptop or computer will come with Windows pre-installed, but what happens when you need to reinstall windows? This happens more than one may think. You have to worry about installing those darn drivers off the DVD that laptop came with (sometimes, it won't even come with a Windows DVD).

For my Mother this is not going to go over too well. In fact this happened and she spent an afternoon trying to install her new system. Enter Ubuntu -> Stuck in the USB key, filled in user info, clicked on what timezone to use and everything else was smooth as butter. No driver install disks. Everything just worked.

Sure, mileage may vary among the newest and greatest hardware. I'll grant that. However, those same new systems come with driver CD's coupled with a lot of useless software that just so happens to be checked for install by default.
1 comments
ajanuary 5019 days ago
What happens when you need to reinstall Windows? You use the restore disc that they give you with all the drivers installed. It comes with them more often than one may think.

More seriously though, I don't know a huge bunch about drivers on Linux. What makes Ubuntu better than Windows and the array of drivers it comes with?

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gizmo686 5019 days ago
Ubuntu has most of the drivers included in the kernel, while windows installs new drivers as needed. For normal computer use, this is an icon in the taskbar saying 'installing device drivers', but when you are on a fresh install, you need to install them yourself.

I recently reinstalled my Dell Inspiron 1420 (after having deleted the recovery partition). They did provide a drivers cd, but I had to click through them 1 at a time.

Obviously, this isn't Microsofts fault, as they do not have the rights to most of the drivers, but in Linux, the norm is to GPL drivers, and put them in mainline kernel, where they will be enabled on all general purpose distributions.

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ajanuary 5018 days ago
Hadn't thought about the impact driver licences have on their integration with the kernel. Cheers.
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