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.
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.
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.
Windows has also needed external drivers installed at times, since the DOS days. It's the nature of obscure, new, or advanced hardware.
The difference was the device came with a disk containing the driver for DOS and Windows.
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