I thought I’d chuck windows on my gaming laptop an Acer nitro 5 from last year, to see how it’s going do some bits I can’t on Linux VR, certain multiplayer games etc.
What a disaster! I’ve spent the whole day brute forcing drivers and generally dicking about trying to get my setup sorted.
Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don’t exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you’re on Wi-Fi. Mint’s had this since what 2006? But that’s cool, Cortana is here to chat away and not understand any requests. Once finally in the OS after 20 questions that could be considered harassment if it was a person, nothing was ready to go. Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.
People have the cheek to complain about Linux’s Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn’t already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.
Plug in my sound card OK it’s a bit old now UA-25 but nothing happens…hmm find obscure video partially install a driver from Vista then cancel the installation program so you can side load a driver from 8,1 but wait there’s more disable core isolation to allow the driver to work reboot into a now slightly more compromised OS.
OK plug in wheel again not new stuff G25 oh it works cool. Oh, no H-shifter OK download driver. “Can’t find device, ensure it’s plugged in”. Windows decided it knew better, downloaded its own driver that blocks the official one and loads a steering wheel as a gamepad…GG cool cool.
I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything. It does worse than nothing, it thinks it’s smart enough to carry out tasks on the user behalf and just bork it.
All of these issues are because I don’t have the new shiny things, but it really highlighted why I love Linux now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to install a distro and play on my 20-year-old peripherals
Never trust a rant from a person that can’t install Windows.
Yeah I’m skeptical. Having installed windows on a machine that I put together about a year ago, it was pretty straightforward. Yeah I needed to install the drivers, but that didn’t take long. Maybe windows 11 is much more tortured than 10 though, which is what I installed.
I think most people are just used to Window’s BS, so these issues are just expected and they know how to fix them.
Linux has an easier experience getting up and running, but when they have an issue, usually it’s something completely different from what they have experienced before and get frustrated.
This is why mainline OEMs shipping computers with Linux by default will be a huge step forward.
I don’t understand (from a technical standpoint) why they can’t just ship a dual boot that only partitions any real space for an OS once you actually use it. Linux is what, 2-3GB on its own with a DE? You could use less than 1% of a modern computer’s storage to give users the option to activate and allocate space to an already-working Linux install whenever they feel like it, and if they really need those few gigs and don’t want Linux, they could just delete it.
Does installing XP count? I might tolerate that.
Can’t bring myself to install the latest few and select “no, do not spy on me” 7 thousand times. They will spy somehow as it’s proprietary - god knows what it’s actually doing.
Ever tried Ameliorated Project? You might be in for a surprise, if you wanted a usable, debloated and despywared Windows 10/11 on the side. Windows is useful, no matter if you use Linux as main.
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Lol right? Windows is beyond simple these days.
14 days ago I tested Ubuntu. I couldn’t access my Wifi. The network was visible, but it refused to accept the password. (Yes, I quintuple-checked that I entered it right.) When I tried Linux Mint, it worked on the first try.
Moral of the story: Drivers are hit-and-miss on Linux, too.
Only moral I got from this was to never use Ubuntu lmao
all hail latest kernel modules, and akmod/dkms
Yes. There are no reasons to use Ubuntu nowadays. If you are on that track, skip to mint or mx linux.
casually puts on Fedora hat
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Hrm, but shouldn’t Linux Mint, being based on Ubuntu, have basically the same drivers?
That’s the point he is making really. Linux has issues that Linux enthusiasts refuse to acknowledge
That reminds me of an issue I had when I was installing Mint. I tried out a live boot first and everything seemed to work except there was no internet connection. Turns out my WiFi card needs a proprietary driver, but no big deal it installed easily enough just from the boot disk. Internet’s working, all looks good, so I go ahead and install Mint proper, remove the live boot usb, start the system, and savour that new Minty smell. But hang on, there’s no WiFi, I forgot to install the driver! Should be an easy enough fix though, it wasn’t hard last time.
So I go to install the driver and the first thing it says is that it needs the boot disk to get the driver. That makes total sense, can’t install something you don’t have! I plug in the usb again and now it should all be plain sailing, after all it’s just installing a driver that worked 20 minutes ago, right? Sadly no, that would be too easy; for some reason now it’s missing dependencies! Or something along those lines anyway, I forget exactly. But can’t it just install those from the boot disk? Well apparently not, it instead tries to connect to the internet to download them. This obviously fails since I don’t have a WiFi connection, which is why I’m installing the driver in the first place. All I get is a popup saying it can’t install some stuff because there’s no internet connection, fix that to get your internet connection. This is the point where face meets palm. I’m sure there’s some fiddly “proper” way to work around that but the thing is I’m incredibly lazy so I’ll just take the quick option instead. I plug in my phone and use a tethered connection. I run the install again and it finally goes through, at last the system is ready to use! It’s been mostly smooth sailing since then (though I did get annoyed enough at NTFS a couple of months ago that I just reformatted a data drive and wiped a ton of data I probably didn’t need).
Tl;dr: I had to tether to my phone for a minute. Traumatising!
Drivers for desktops are pretty much a non-issue on Windows, in fact, most will be installed via the internet before you even boot the desktop for the first time.
Drivers for gaming laptops are a nightmare on Windows, and you’ll probably have to chase weird slow pages in the manufacturer’s website to perhaps find 4 packages that might contain the driver you want.
I have clean installed windows on a lot of gaming laptops. Most of the time windows updates pulls in every driver for you if windows have the correct wifi driver to begin with. If it doesn’t i just download wifi driver on my phone and transfer it.
Perhaps it’s gotten better since the last time I’ve used a laptop, I really avoid them nowadays. Either way, good to know.
Or upu just download the ryzen or Intel softwsre/chipset drivers and it’s all sorted. Though for gaming laptops chasing down means going to the manufacturer support site for that specific model…
Thanks for the post, interesting.
I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything.
Microsoft has been
blackmailingpushing computer hardware companies for a long time to have Windows bundled with computers. Your story has now enlightened me why they did so all these years :)Windows and MacOS are “noob-friendly” for those who use them for simple purposes and out-of-the-box. As soon as you want to do something more advanced, you’re back to googling and installing software from a variety of sources.
Many linux distros are like that too (others are just not noob-friendly at all), but centralized package management and documentation are nice.
I’m really glad to be away from registry editing, 50 app icons in the tray, and navigating my way through settings to control panel so I can actually fix my audio devices or network options.
I’m on Arch now, so I still have plenty of configuration and software, but I know the systems and choose explicitly which ones I use. If something isn’t working or is annoying, it’s my fault.
Huh? I’m all for d***riding on Linux but this is a weird case. I’ve not had a single issue with windows on gaming laptops even across multiple reinstalls. They’re all automatically installed soon after you boot. Just need to wait through a few updates.
Yeah I’ve never had a missing driver problem with a windows install since maybe windows 7. I even moved a hard drive with a windows 8 install from an Asus laptop with an Intel cpu to a custom build desktop with a ryzen cpu without having to change any drivers. I did have to reactivate windows because of the hardware change but that’s it.
The included drivers are often providing less performance than updated ones from the vendor though, so it is recommended to download those in some cases, specifically nvidia. But most gaming laptops will have a vendor provided update center to manage all of that for you.
I like Linux over windows for a lot of reasons but this post is a bit silly.
The pretentiousness is off the scales with this one
accurate tho
i had to manually disable driver updates via windows update because it picks the shittiest possible drivers for everything
Built a PC for my cousin, Windows likes to delete its own Wi-Fi driver among other issues, not to mention using modern Microsoft products feels like a rectal probing with how invasive it is.
Blame the oems, dell ships dell OS with windows branding.
Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don’t exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you’re on Wi-Fi.
This is a good thing with modern Windows. You don’t want it online while it’s installing, you want to install, lock things down a bit and then connect.
Unless you’re using one of the more recent Win11 builds, where you won’t be able to finish OOBE without an internet connection unless you had the foresight to patch the installer beforehand.
Mind you, I haven’t installed a Windows Home OS since ever, but Shift+F10 and then using OOBE\bypassnro works just fine for me.
Yeah I mean I downgrade new computers to Windows 10 Enterprise and
patchauthenticate with MAS. I tried using Windows 11, but the taskbar pissed me off too much - I want separate tabs starting from the left, not combined, and everything always showing in the notification area. I was going to put up with the tab thing but having to manually set every single notification icon to not hide itself away was just a dealbreaker. I want to know what’s running, so I know to kill it.
I’ve installed Windows on a system I’ve built myself, and I’ve had so many problems…
Firstly, did you know what Windows doesn’t allow you to install it on a partition that isn’t the first one on the drive (under certain circumstances)? It also doesn’t give you sensible error messages that that’s the problem.
I also had to install audio drivers from the disk that came with my motherboard (the ones on the website didn’t work).
I don’t know if this was this system or some other one, but I’ve faced the whole “no network card drivers so can’t download network card drivers” issue.
Recently I made the controversial decision of booting Windows with an external drive plugged in, so it decided to reorder my device letter mappings and break a bunch of shortcuts.
And of course, there’s no resource like the arch wiki, so you’re basically left on your own to fix things.
Windows may or may not be easier to use, but it certainly isn’t easier to install and fix.
Windows and Linux have opposite problems for starters with newer hardware better supported on Windows and old hardware supported on Linux. As Linux gets more popular, it will start to shine because if newer hardware becomes better supported, the experience will truly be that Linux just works and Windows needs drivers for done stuff.
The other big factor is that Windows is already installed. So, you don’t have to do anything or, at most, one or two things. Even if that one thing is hard, you are more likely to blame that one thing than Windows.
Finally, we have to acknowledge that your experience sounds atypical for Windows installs. Most of my hardware is easier to put Linux on than Windows but I doubt any of them would be that hard.
We also have to admit that Linux does not have drivers for everything while Windows basically does ( somewhere ). So, Linux can be the bigger bummer overall. Of course, this is in the x86-64 universe only. Linux has vastly better hardware support when you consider other platforms.
This is mostly an Acer issue I think. A decent vendor will have a software package or even their website that will handle updating your drivers.
Surprise! They virtually all do, but they didn’t look.
I often get shattered by windows users how hard it is to install Nvidia drivers or get it to work.
Like. Idk why they are like this or how I should tell them otherwise. But they will give me a response of their experience as proof of how hard it is.
I mean. Its even pteinstalled on some distros so wtf.
I can’t say I’ve ever had this experience with installing drivers on Windows. Is it as smooth and centralized as Linux? No, but it’s generally just go to manufacturers website, find product, find support page, locate drivers, download/install, rinse and repeat. Never had to go watch videos that led me to a partial install of drivers for an outdated Windows version. If WiFi doesn’t work, use USB tethering from your phone. The laptop will act like it’s connected to Ethernet (this at least lets you go to the Acer website to find the right WiFi drivers for your laptop).
Also never had Cortana bother me during setup. You can always skip all that extra crap. Last time I installed Win10 was to update my NVidia GPU firmware and it took 10 minutes.
Actually, both Ubuntu and Mint didn’t have wifi drivers for my late-2014 Mac Mini (Intel based). I had to plugin ethernet so I could actually download the drivers. Also, the version of Windows you might have installed might have been older than your PC, so no drivers would naturally be in it (e.g. Win11 is already 2-3 years old).
