Comment by ponorin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ponorin | Hacker News Reader

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I've tried installing Windows 10 to my old ("old" as in Ryzen 2000 series) HP laptop so that I can give it out, and it took forever to install all the updates. Windows Update sucks even when you give permission to do whatever it wants; super slow, doesn't know what to prioritise, and unable to just jump to the newest release. And even then it missed some drivers, especially the fingerprint sensor, so to this day Windows Hello still doesn't work. Remember this device originally shipped with Windows.

I can install Fedora Linux on my Surface Go with my eyes closed, barely touching the keyboard. Everything that is supported works out of the box and it doesn't take a day and a half.

That's not exactly fair. hp flops on its face with the software realm (drivers, firmware) and deploying windows to any is a nightmare of missing drivers.

The surface is more constrained to specific hardware so I think any operating system would be easy to kick to it much like a Thinkpad.

No, it's not. There's a known bug where the Surface will not turn on/off the IR camera during the login process, resulting in either a "can't turn on camera, please enter PIN" message or worse: leaving the IR camera on after login significantly reducing its lifetime (it gets hot to the touch) and doing god knows what to your eyes.

Of course, everyone is quick to blame the manufacturer when it comes to drivers, even when the MS supposedly vets these drivers and even when the manufacturer is MS itself.

You can also find hardware on which Linux will install just fine. We should blame to OS for driver issues or not, either way, but we can’t have a double standard.

Well, if you're using an old Windows 10 installer (my assumption), yeah, that's just how it goes. Like, if you're starting at Win 10 1909, that's like upgrading Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04. Start with an updated installer and you'll have a better time.

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