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Why do you have to install Usb-Drivers on Windows, but I never had to do it on Linux? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On my Job I regularly have to install Windows PCs and sometimes even install the USB Drivers for Mouse and Keyboard to work. Why dont I have to do that on Linux ever? Seems weird not to have them installed on Windows.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Can you explain what you mean by this. I have only a bit of experience with a few distros but hardware issues have always been a bugaboo for me with Linux. This statement seems quite the opposite of my experience. I mean I guess it's because of the third party proprietary drivers, but that's a decent chunk of the hardware pie and it's hard for me not to include that in "better hardware support"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

There are basically two different approaches to drivers. Windows will have some very basic drivers built-in, but most of them are downloaded and installed when a component that requires them is detected in current versions of Windows.

Linux on the other hand includes every driver it knows about out of the box. You won't ever need to install additional drivers if the hardware is supported. This makes Linux an excellent portable system, you can just take a drive out of one pc with an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU and put it into one with an Intel CPU and AMD GPU without driver issues*.

*as long as you stick to the included drivers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Linux runs on a LOT more different systems than Windows. The stuff it doesn't run well on is mostly built into desktop computers, so that's what the average user notices.