this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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 ...