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
Yes it does grab the right things without fail. Hardware identification is trivial at this point, all have their IDs.
Yes, I remember those times, but we're past that.
Nowadays it is usually better to let Windows grab drivers for you because it will grab the driver and no other extra crap. A lot of devices come with useless bundled software and Microsoft is very strict when it comes to installing software with the drivers - they only do it for GPUs, sound cards and a couple exceptions - guess that Microsoft now wants an monopoly on who can install crapware in your system as well :P
There are a few exceptions to this, special hardware that isn't properly registered on the Windows Update catalog and Windows won't pull drivers, for those cases people should head into the support page of their device and download drivers from there. Some brands may also make this easier, for instance HP has a tool that will detect your machine model and download and install the required drivers.
It's actually worse! Last jan Microsoft bricked the entire fleet of laptops in my company with a borked generic driver update. It overwrote the sd reader's vendor driver blocking all storage access from working whatsoever. From one week to another more or less all devices refused to boot. They basically killed our entire company for half a week, until IT could walk people through efi-disabling the sd reader in every laptop (recent industrial models mind you) just because windows had pulled in the wrong driver. So... no - it's not great at all with automatic driver installation in windows ...