Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

To: Knitebane

Actually most Windows drivers are pretty small, in the same range as Linux drivers. The difference is that with Windows the company will also generally ship some sort of configuration utility (which 99% of the time is completely useless) which has all that GUI overhead and gives you megabytes of stuff. But the ACTUAL driver, the part that’s needed, is tiny.


42 posted on 07/23/2008 8:26:32 AM PDT by boogerbear
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 39 | View Replies ]


To: boogerbear
The difference is that with Windows the company will also generally ship some sort of configuration utility (which 99% of the time is completely useless) which has all that GUI overhead and gives you megabytes of stuff.

There's a lot of truth to that. A hardware manufacturer will provide a package that has both the driver and the utility. And quite often that utility provides a lot of garbage that just mucks up the system.

With Linux, the utility is generally provided by the distro and is much smaller.

The reason for this is that many manufacturer's software is driven by marketing: "Now with the Gunkulator 3000! A new tool to do what the old tool did! Buy some more of our stuff!"

Under Linux, the drivers are written (mostly) by the people that write the kernel. The utilities are written by the people that write the distribution. So you get a leaner, more efficient OS.

Microsoft has always let manufacturers provide drivers and utilities, many of which do horrendous things and violate basic security protocols. They decided to do something about this (theoretically) with Vista and only allow drivers that Microsoft has signed off on.

This hasn't been nearly as successful as hoped. Either you don't get drivers at all because either the manufacturer won't provide a driver or Microsoft won't sign off on it, or the company puts pressure on Microsoft to ship a faulty driver (Intel graphics chip) so they can sell their product.

So, while the theory is good, it really has ended up being just as bad as before as far as driver stability, or worse, with no driver at all.

43 posted on 07/23/2008 8:37:24 AM PDT by Knitebane (Happily Microsoft free since 1999.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 42 | View Replies ]

To: boogerbear
Actually most Windows drivers are pretty small, in the same range as Linux drivers. The difference is that with Windows the company will also generally ship some sort of configuration utility (which 99% of the time is completely useless) which has all that GUI overhead and gives you megabytes of stuff. But the ACTUAL driver, the part that’s needed, is tiny.And a lot of times they do it an a very high handed arrogant manner. One time I was in a customers plant and needed to print something. He had good internet access so I went to the Epson website and downloaded the 65MB or whatever "driver" and installed it. So of course, without giving you the option to decline, it installs all of its crapware. So I just uninstall it, figuring only the "utility" will be deleted. Wrong. Deleted the driver as well! Couldn't find any way to install the driver without the program or delete the program without the driver. I eventually found a way, and the way I usually do this now is to install it on another machine where I don't care about the crapware (sometimes in a VM which will be reverted to pre-crapware as soon as I'm done), set up the printer as a network printer, then attach to that printer from the machine I really want to use, opting in Windows printer setup to import the driver to the local machine. This imports just the driver, leaving the crapware, and then you can delete the garbage off the other machine. Just pisses me off that due to their arrogance, you have to go to these lengths to run the part of software that they actually owe you. Have the same problem with a Brother all-in-one that I bought. It is networked (wifi even) and will store received faxes internally and if you install and run their crapware on a PC in the network, you can download and save the faxes and scans on that machine. Why the crapware? Why isn't the internal memory of the machine simply set up as a shared drive? I can see the machine on the network. Why not leverage existing Windows services and instead force me to load software that bogs down my computer and contains who knows what? It also makes me suspicious of the intent of the software if they went to all the trouble to write it when everything that it supposedly does could be done with Windows networking services you already have.
127 posted on 07/24/2008 10:03:26 AM PDT by Still Thinking (Typical white person)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 42 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson