Comment by nwallin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwallin | Hacker News Reader

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Graphics card drivers is a solved problem. Intel/AMD "just work". Nvidia works okay-ish if you don't mind closed source drivers and unless it's a card nvidia has dropped support for. In both cases, switching to Windows is not an improvement: all the bad parts of nvidia on Linux also apply to Nvidia on Windows.

HiDPI is mostly fine, with the exception of mixing high dpi in xorg. Mixing DPI works in wayland. So I'll grant you that the combination of nvidia+mixing DPI doesn't work, because nvidia's drivers don't support wayland.

Otherwise I strongly disagree, and I'm genuinely confused as to why this myth persists. Wrangling drivers on windows is a huge pain. There's no one "update" button I can press to update all my drivers, let alone all my other software. I have to go through the driver manager and manually right click and select "update driver" which frankly nuts. And to update the graphics card I have to periodically go to nvidia's website and check manually? What year is it again? Why doesn't Windows do this for me?

Windows Update keeps drivers up to date except for ones installed manually.

It will not update all of them, just some. Clicking through the device manager on my work computer, it seems the driver for "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller" was not up to date, and had not been updated by Windows Update. I never installed this driver manually.

If you're on a Windows machine right now, try it. Right click on a bunch of stuff in device manager and hit update driver. Clicking through on my machine and maybe 1/5 have an update.

The crazy thing is that it's a really painful process. It takes 15-30 seconds per device just to come back with "no updates" and you can't just select a whole bunch of them and do them all at once: you have to do it one at a time and go through the wizard for everything. And there are simply too many devices to do them all, so all of us are using plenty of outdated drivers. This is an absurd situation, it's 2020.

There are third party apps that do this automatically, but I don't know that I trust them.

This is likely a result of your system admins not including drivers in their WSUS or other patch management system.

WSUS is sort of a corporate Windows Update server where you can approve updates to groups of machines on whatever schedule you want.

A lot of WSUS admins skip drivers because they massively slow down the sync/approval process and take tons of disk space. Windows has tens of thousands of drivers.

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