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Comment by zsoltkacsandi | Hacker News Reader

And that's why I don't use Windows.

Does Linux have a better story for old drivers?

Yes, they are maintained as a part of the open kernel source and have been proven to remain usable for long periods.

But only the ones that are in the kernel. It's fairly common that you need to install some yourself, for things that Windows would install from partners via this Windows Update mechanism.

There is one class of devices for which you often want manufacturer's out-of-kernel driver: Nvidia graphic cards. Otherwise all drivers are usually already in the kernel.

If you want it to be comparable to the partner-provided drivers in Windows Update, there must be situations you install them from outside, right? Like Canon and HP have printer driver downloads for Linux. Or maybe the built-in generic one is good enough already.

It's been decades for me since I've had a machine with an important device that is completely "unrecognizable" without a custom driver. Generic drivers work for almost everything.

Because Windows gets direct support from most HW vendors, it's generic drivers don't have to be as good as Linux's in general, but still they work fine.

Printers are very special case. They are a shitshow in different ways between Windows and Linux.

Windows printer support is from like 1920s or some shit and they can't change it and it's just bad. BUT, if you have weird ass Xerox or HP with crazy features like a printer that will print, stable, copy, re-copy, and then automatically shred the documents and their copies is likely to only ever be controllable through some HP software from 2006 that hasn't been updated since then but somehow still works on Windows.

On linux, you get much better printing service and generic support, but depending on the popularity of your office printer and the popularity of particular feature you're trying to use, it might not be in the drivers.

Well I also just realized, Linux kernel is only going to include open-source drivers which some vendors annoyingly won't give, while Microsoft doesn't care.

Drivers generally go into the kernel code repo so yeah it's a lot better.

No, and neither does macOS. But if I bought a printer seven years ago and the driver is definitely outdated, my Linux and macOS machines aren't forcing me to stop using it. Legacy/outdated software will be always with us. The solution is not to brick the end users' device.

Depends where you got the driver from. macOS includes some via the system updates, and those get removed sometimes. Windows has the equivalent. It's not that Microsoft is deleting drivers you installed yourself from outside, they're ones "published on Windows Update" according to the post.

Just a quick note: macOS usually doesn't distribute third-party vendor drivers through system updates. Most hardware vendors provide their own macOS drivers directly, if needed. So while Windows may include some third-party drivers via Windows Update, macOS tends to leave that up to the user or the vendor.

Oh you're right, I was thinking of the OS X days when I'd get a million updates like https://support.apple.com/en-us/106418

Windows isn't going to brick your device. The article is twisting words, because according to the official announcement: (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/hardwaredevcenter/r...)

> The first phase targets legacy drivers that have newer replacements already on Windows Update.

If the driver is in the kernel tree, then the Linux community maintains the driver for you for free basically (if a refactor of some internal kernel API is done, all drivers are updated), but once the driver is old enough, new kernel releases might sometimes removes those old drivers (and even drop support for old CPUs as well).

Closed-source bobs are closely tied to the kernel version, since the kernel’s internal ABI and API is constantly changing. There is some documentation on why here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

Well, in my experience, the most important thing to worry about is whether the driver is there in the first place.

Might be a dumb question, but why are so many drivers in the kernel? I get that things like a mass storage device probably needs to be in the kernel but a printer or mouse driver seems like it should work from the user space.

I was wondering the opposite... why doesn't Windows have most drivers built in like the Linux kernel?

If something doesn’t need kernel access, is it good for it to have kernel access?

I've always assumed that it actually does, and in both cases people are installing drivers from outside for less common peripherals. Maybe I'm wrong.

To a large degree Windows offers a lot of generic drivers for everything from wifi to trackpads to bluetooth devices. Hardware vendors can still offer advanced drivers and tools to tweak special things about a particular trackpad or a wifi device.

But also because NT interface is mostly stable unlike linux. last really major version was 20 years ago and there Microsoft doesn't need to maintain 3rd party drivers in-tree. Also, the licensing and distribution mechanism and vehicles make certain things too complex.

Also plenty of people don't like these linux kernel images and build stripped down ones.

Even old versions of the driver?

There’s no such thing as an “old version” for an in-kernel driver.

As the kernel is maintained, polished, and updated, all drivers are maintained as well.

Proprietary blobs otoh, will break quickly, and have to constantly keep up with new kernel releases.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-SoundBlaster-AWE32

> Linux Delivering Driver Fix For 30 Year Old Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA Sound Card

Seems highly likely that Microsoft have better data on which hardware is actually in use.

Linux is more likely to have a driver for some obscure hardware, because no one has actually been comfortable removing it in the past decade, but it's also not actually tested on actual hardware. Unless it's an Itanium CPU, in which case the code is gone.

We had the same story regarding file systems last year. Technically Linux had a driver for an old Unix filesystem, but it had only been tested on filesystems made with the same driver/filesystem-code, not on actual disks with the original filesystem.

The Linux advantage is that if you really need that hardware to work, you might get lucky, and if not, you're not starting from scratch.

Because they don't distribute old drivers with known security vulnerabilities?

I haven’t used it in 10 years. It’s completely unusable.

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