Comment by jacquesm

1 day ago

It's been like that for 15 years or more.

The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.

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jacquesm

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dannyfritz07  1 day ago

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example.

Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.

  • noAnswer  1 day ago

    Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.

    Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.

    26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.

    So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.

  • mixmastamyk  1 day ago

    Windows has also needed external drivers installed at times, since the DOS days. It's the nature of obscure, new, or advanced hardware.