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
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.