Comment by digiown
5 hours ago
One good thing we can say about Linux bundling all the drivers is that it obviates the need to run almost all of this type of low quality (if not outright spyware) driver management software. They are especially problematic because they can't be sandboxed easily like most other proprietary crap.
For whatever reason, distro maintainers working for free seem a lot more competent with security than billion dollar hardware vendors
> For whatever reason, distro maintainers working for free seem a lot more competent with security than billion dollar hardware vendors
I don't believe that these billion dollar hardware vendors are really incompetent with security. It's rather that the distro maintainers do care quite a bit about security, while for these hardware vendors consider these security concerns to be of much smaller importance; for their business it is likely much more important to bring the next hardware generation to the market as fast as possible.
In other words: distro maintainers and hardware vendors are simply interested in very different things and thus prioritize things very differently.
Sure. New sales means new revenue. Maintenance and support is just overhead.
It's shortsighted, but modern capitalism is more shortsighted than Mr. Magoo.
Is the issue in the OP related to windows? this wasn't immediately clear
Linux has had support loading kernel modules since 1995.
It is, mostly, the organization Linus created (and of course the enormous number of people participating).
An absurd amount of weight is carried by a small number of very influential people that can and want to just do a good job.
And a signal that they're the best is you don't see them in the news.
We need more very influential people who aren't newsworthy.
The most direct comparison would be the package manager, that's why I said distros. These driver management tools do a (poor) job at being a package manager, along with many other commercial software installation tools.
With Linux itself, it helps that they are working in public (whether volunteering or as a job), and you'd be sacked not in a closed-door meeting, but on LKML for everyone to see if you screw up this badly.