Very good points. I remember the drama of trying to get simple things like USB, Bluetooth and even WiFi working on Linux quite a few years ago. However, even though those could be problematic, I did learn a ton about how drivers interacted with various chipsets. That, in turn, led me down the path of how to apply specific patches and build my own kernel modules. It was absolutely a double edged sword.
It really is a shame that most GPU vendors haven’t spent more time developing better drivers for Linux, but in some ways, I feel their pain. (I am leaving out the open vs closed source debate on that.) Windows does provide consistency, through all of its shortcomings. Linux can be very … eh… interesting between different distros, for sure.
But yeah, I didn’t rush to downvote the above commenter as they were speaking from their own perspective and experience. No shame in that.
Uh, Wifi drivers in the 2000s on Linux… That was painful. I remember one specific Wifi USB stick, where the Linux driver just came as source code. I mean, good for them for making an open source driver, but back then I was just a teenager with very little coding experience, and they had no guide on how to compile it at all. Also it was written for an older version of gcc than what I had, and gcc threw a ton of errors because that. So I had to go through the whole driver source and fix all these compiler errors, even though I had no C++ experience at all. Just to get a dumb Wifi stick to work.
In Windows, back than, it was just “plonk it in, double click the driver on the CD and be done”. I don’t miss those days.
