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by dannyfritz07 165 days ago
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example.

Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.
3 comments
noAnswer 164 days ago
Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.

Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.

26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.

So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.

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mixmastamyk 164 days ago
Windows has also needed external drivers installed at times, since the DOS days. It's the nature of obscure, new, or advanced hardware.
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Kye 164 days ago
The difference was the device came with a disk containing the driver for DOS and Windows.
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jacquesm 164 days ago
I don't see how that is Linux' fault.
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Kye 164 days ago
I didn't say it was. This discussion is about relative difficulty of setting things up. It is, objectively, more difficult when you need to download a driver for new hardware and the NIC on your laptop needs a driver your distro didn't come with.
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mixmastamyk 164 days ago
Not for a very long time.
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Kye 163 days ago
I don't buy a lot of hardware, but the last thing I bought (Vocaster One) came with the driver installer on a small USB mass storage volume when the device plugged in.
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jijijijij 163 days ago
That's Arch for you.

I've been on Linux since Ubuntu 8.04 or longer and I literally never had OS install problems with any of it at all. Except for Arch, but what did you expect? Hands-on is the point of Arch Linux.

On the other hand, I remember installing a lot of drivers by hand on windows. Most people never (re-)installed Windows or macOS to begin with.

Probably depends on your hardware, but that's a matter of vendor support, not operating system. It's not like Microsoft or Apple are writing all those drivers. With a Thinkpad or Brother, you likely never had problems with Linux for the last 20 years. People don't complain they can't install macOS on a Chromebook, and Windows has been the absolute OS monopoly everyone had to support. However, with tinkering, you can install Linux on a washing machine.

What has drastically changed is the user space software side. First off some FOSS alternatives like Blender, OBS, Krita... are becoming equal or better than the competition, but Valve also basically solved gaming on Linux, now. Virtualization and software development is and always has been better.

To be fair, Linux also shines now due to enshitification of everything else.

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