[longislandguido]

> Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers

All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.

Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.

Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.

You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.

One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?

[JSR_FDED]

> you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts

Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now

[dddddaviddddd]

Hence

> that almost certainly will break in the next OS release

My scanner has drivers available for download that date from 2015 with no updates since then.

[longislandguido]

My solution to this very problem was to virtualize an ancient OS X (was not easy) so I could continue to use a perfectly good scanner.

Though I'm certain you've raised this issue before, and it was met with "I've never heard of anyone needing a scanner, you must be doing something weird, have you tried taking a picture of it with your iPhone(R) instead?"

[cosmic_cheese]

> All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.

If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.

[inopinatus]

> Unless you install the bare OS from scratch

This caveat is doing enough heavy lifting for an Olympic podium.