It's 2022, and Windows 11's ISO lacks drivers for 2020 laptops Linux and BSD has | Hacker News Reader

It's 2022, and Windows 11's ISO lacks drivers for 2020 laptops Linux and BSD has

68 points_jula25 comments

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows. I am a FreeBSD "Ports" (packaging) committer.

I own a HP Spectre x360 14" which dual-boots Windows 11 and FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT. The Spectre is my personal laptop. I recently reinstalled Windows.

Laptops on Intel's TigerLake platform use something called VMD which supposedly helps with Intel's Optane SSD by taking over the NVMe. Some laptops like Lenovo ThinkPad models allow you to disable VMD, but my Spectre does not, so you need a second USB to sideload the drivers.

What else? There is no touchpad on the Windows installer. Linux and FreeBSD both have had TigerLake touchpad drivers for a while.

I remember working with a developer to build FreeBSD drivers for the VMD, and submitting a patch myself for TigerLake touchpad, and both are in FreeBSD 13.0 from over a year back.

Yet neither are in Windows 11's ISO, even the latest "Visual Studio" downloads, and on both Windows 11 Home and Enterprise.

The mainline Linux kernel has drivers for Apple M1 outside the GPU, something that needs many man-hours of reverse engineering. Windows 11 doesn't even have drivers long committed in the Linux and FreeBSD trees.

While I can install Windows 11 on an 8th Gen WhiskeyLake Spectre fine, touchpad and NVMe, it's a hassle on 11th Gen hardware even when the hardware isn't even super new, 12th Gen laptops are already out.

I guess the wrong person at Redmond got the note for the drivers :-). If someone reading this works at Windows, please add drivers for Intel's VMD and TigerLake/AlderLake touchpad.

So you work for Microsoft and you figured out that the best way to notify your colleagues about these issues is to post on Hacker News?

I guess this is a good demonstration of the rumored silo culture at Microsoft.

Yes

Part of the reason why I wrote about CompatTelRunner is that Billy O'Neal was complaining about it on Twitter.

Microsoft is huge, with a lot of technical/organizational legacy. Think of it like a Linux distro, cloud, gaming, ERP and what not all rolled under one brand. So communications cannot always happen 1-to-1 like a clique in a graph. Even internally often the route to report bugs/ask features is similar to what is available to public.

To be honest, Windows has always kinda sucked at including drivers in the default install. In the XP days it was normal for almost nothing to work properly after installing. VGA with basic VESA only, no network etc. Part of the job was figuring out where to get all the drivers from and how to get them onto the machine you were installing with half the hardware not yet working.

Linux has always been great at long term support and if something was supported it would work out of the box. Though of course many things weren't supported at all. These days that has really improved.

Thanks for your work on the ports collection. I use FreeBSD daily as my main machine.

I used to have those programs that scan your device and install your driver for you on a CD drive. It was a eureka moment when I figured how to find the vendor and the product Ids and then use it to search for the correct driver on the internet. It was infuriating when the same model had different hardware in it and you have to figure out the correct one to get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth working.

It was shocking trying out Linux distros and seeing it included everything already.

Those programs are still around. The current favourite among PC builder is snappy driver installer. It is actually more useful now than a couple of years ago because a couple of major vendors like Intel have decided that it's a good thing to purge all drivers of EOL products from their official website.

And yes I can definitely echo your experience. When I first installed Mandriva Linux in 2003 it was quite a shock to see everything work out of the box on my 2001 computer.

When I first plugged in my RX 6700 XT, I thought Windows 10 would detect and automatically use it upon reboot. Nope, laggy desktop - I had to download a driver for the GPU from the AMD website. Ubuntu 20.04, on the other hand, immediately supported it out of the box - the only further configuration on my end was to set the frame rate to 144 Hz instead of 60 Hz.

Oh man, I thought I was alone. The other day I installed Win11 on an EliteBook 840 G8, with an 11th gen itel.

The VMD thing was off in the BIOS, so the storage was detected, but the touchpad moved a pixel or two and then died. The trackpoint wouldn't work either. I could only install it with an external mouse. After manually going through the pile of random HP drivers, I managed to get everything directly part of the PC working.

But at work we have some HP USB-C docks, which have DisplayPort and HDMI pass-through. Neat little boxes. But Windows, for some reason, has me do a ridiculous dance to get 4k@60Hz through DP. I have to plug the screen in HDMI, unplug DP, replug DP, unplug HDMI and it works. If I reboot, I'm back to square one. No such clownshow on Linux, everything just worked out of the box.

I also have a cousin of this laptop, an EB845 G8, which is Zen 3 based. On this, I could install Win11, but other than that the out of the box experience was terrible. It needed the AMD graphics drivers to get anything above some absurdly low resolution. And even after installing all the drivers on the HP site, and even using their "driver detection utility" thingy, which reports AOK, the webcam is still not detected and I get random exclamation marks in the device manager. Nothing of the sort in Linux, everything works perfectly.

I'm happy to know that HP recommends Windows 11...

I installed windows on a NUC few yeras ago, after using (of course ...) linuxes on them, and was amazed to have to download driver on the intel site for the wifi card or whatever (hopefully I had ethernet cable lying around). It remind me my youth and windows 95 and the driver on CDs / disks that came with the hardware.

Speaking of NUC... once I tried to install then-current LTSB release of Windows 10 on a Dawson Canyon NUC. The installer noped out, that there's no drive found (otherwise standard NVMe). The installer didn't accept Intel drivers from another USB either.

"Normal" Win10 release installed fine. Just like any Linux distro I tried (fedora, ubuntu, centos). It was even capable to run as Hackintosh with a bit of effort. But not Win10 LTSB.

Similar story here. Even 400MiB Arch stick booted up just fine...

It's a really frustrating issue that took a bit of googling to solve. I have had a dedicated Windows install USB Stick with a copy of the required VMD files in a separate folder for months now. You don't need a second USB.

> Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows. I am a FreeBSD "Ports" (packaging) committer.

Whelp, we don’t know who you are but they do. How many could there be?

You should probably be asking Intel to lobby for the inclusion of the drivers in Windows, as those drivers will be Intel's IP not Microsoft's.

The vanilla Windows 10\11 ISO doesn’t support Surface Laptop kb or trackpad during imaging so this doesn’t surprise me at all

This is really common across all windows ISO releases. When I did MSP work we would commonly build our own Windows ISOs with added drivers to get around these issues.

Windows drivers are regularly hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes of vendor-applied value-added trash. There's no way they could cram them all into the OS. And it's never been the case that Microsoft tries to provide tons of drivers out of the box.

Also, you're supposed to be using the machine's restore functionality. You're not supposed to install the OS your own way. It's been this way forever. You installing your own OS is not what Microsoft cares about.

Most Windows drivers are quite small, in the single megabyte range. The majority of the download size is either the installer or optional utilities that are installed with the driver, but are not necessary for the device to work.

Graphics drivers (and to some extend audio drivers) are exceptions to this.

I am a bit confused. Last week I bought a 12th gen Intel ThinkPad that came with Win11. Everything works just fine, including the touchpad. For the touchpad specifically, there is also some 'enhancer' utility that comes preinstalled. I assume that if I had to reinstall Windows (I believe there should be a partition for this purpose) it would put the laptop in the same state it is in now, so I'm not really following what the author is saying. In the worst case, won't Windows Update download the driver from Microsoft?

Is the author saying that some drivers are not included on the DVD image, or that there are drivers that Microsoft isn't making available at all, even via windows update?

The issue is that on a vanilla ISO the touchpad is dead. You can't use it at all, as in the pointer won't move on the screen. Which makes it a pain to install and especially to connect to a wireless network, because these computers don't usually have network ports anymore.

I've been dealing with missing drivers since Windows 3.11. In the case you're describing, I'd connect a USB mouse, or just 'tab' my way through setup.

Sure, there are workarounds, but this is pretty basic functionality, we're not talking about perfect acceleration curves or exotic devices. Hell, I'm pretty sure windows 3.11 didn't need specific drivers for moving my mouse around.

And Linux somehow found a way to get it working out of the box. And I'm not talking Ubuntu or Pop OS, but Arch Linux, which comes with ~nothing installed. I just started i3 on top of xorg, and I had a working touchpad. Sure, the movement was shoddy until I configured it, but it was serviceable.

To download the driver you need a network connection. To have a working network connection you need working device drivers for your network devices and maybe your motherboard. In your case Lenovo did this.for you (installed the drivers). If you do not have instalation media and drivers i would advise to be very careful when reinstalling windows.

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